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Synopsis The present study entitled ‘Time in the Poetry of Matthew Arnold’ focuses on Arnold’s three fold, present and future, which are also identified with the ‘the forest glade’, ‘the burning or darkling plain’ and ‘the wide glimmering sea’ separated from one another by a kind of ‘gorge’. As a whole, this dialectic denotes the life of an individual and these regions are childhood, maturity and old age or death. The first is a period of joyous innocence when one lives in harmony with Nature, the second a period of suffering when one is along in a ‘hostile world’, and the third a period of peace in which suffering subsides into calm and then grows up into a new joy, the joy of active service in the world which is clearly discernible in his poetry.