But perhaps the tale of East Durham coal is not so much that "long, withdrawing roar" after all.
Among the echoes in Serra's steel canyons is that of something Matthew Arnold perceived at Dover Beach, a "long, withdrawing roar".
Please let the dialectic be over soon, so that we can hear the wave's long, withdrawing roar.
I thought of Matthew Arnold's "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar," and also of the line that the earth goddess Erda utters in the "Ring": "Everything that is, ends".
An Anglo-Balkan moment The end of the age of war ReprintsThe long withdrawing roarIn Britain, Afghanistan has generally been regarded as the "good war".
Coal was no longer king – and this was a case of what the poet Matthew Arnold in "Dover Beach" called the "melancholy, long withdrawing roar".
The 19th century was also an age of receding faith – "Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar", in Matthew Arnold's famous maritime-inflected phrase.
They lead the world in exams, but they are like faith in Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach", with their authority retreating in a "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar".
Put your ear close to it, and you hear a long, withdrawing, melancholy sigh, as Leigh's distinctive brand of Englishness, always resigned but never quite defeated, washes past.
Richter is a philosophical skeptic, though never detectably cynical; he makes elegant sport of something like what Matthew Arnold heard, on Dover Beach, as the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of perishing traditions.
