Arthur Hugh Clough

The Latest Decalogue

Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?
No graven images may be

Currency worship

Clough flips the commandment's intent—the original banned idols, but Victorian capitalism makes money the only acceptable graven image.

Worshipp'd, except the currency:
Swear not at all; for, for thy curse
Thine enemy is none the worse:
At church on Sunday to attend
Will serve to keep the world thy friend:

Strategic attendance

Church becomes social networking. The shift from 'serve God' to 'serve to keep the world thy friend' turns worship into reputation management.

Honour thy parents; that is, all
From whom advancement may befall:
Thou shalt not kill; but need'st not strive

Officiously

Legal term meaning 'meddlesome' or 'overzealous.' Don't murder, but don't be annoyingly helpful about saving lives either—perfect Victorian restraint.

Officiously to keep alive:
Do not adultery commit;
Advantage rarely comes of it:

Cost-benefit adultery

Pure economic calculation replaces moral reasoning. 'Advantage rarely comes of it' treats the commandment as bad business advice, not sin.

Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,

Cheat vs. steal

Stealing is crude and illegal. Cheating—through business, contracts, legal loopholes—is how respectable Victorians actually extracted wealth.

When it's so lucrative to cheat:
Bear not false witness; let the lie
Have time on its own wings to fly:
Thou shalt not covet; but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.

Tradition approves

Final punch: 'tradition' (often invoked to defend Christian morality) now blesses the coveting that drives capitalism. The commandment eats itself.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Victorian Hypocrisy in Couplets

Clough published this in 1862, at the height of Victorian moral self-congratulation. The title promises an updated Ten Commandments, but delivers something darker: a field guide to how respectable society had already rewritten God's law into capitalist pragmatism.

The couplet form is the key technical move. Each commandment gets exactly two lines—the first states the rule, the second undercuts it with economic logic. The rhyme scheme creates a trap: the moral principle in line one leads inevitably to its corruption in line two, as if the rhyme itself proves the connection. "who / two" makes monotheism sound like penny-pinching. "be / currency" makes the leap from banning idols to worshipping money feel natural, almost grammatical.

Clough was writing after losing his Oxford fellowship for religious doubts. He'd watched the church accommodate itself to industrial capitalism, watched Christian businessmen justify exploitation with scripture. This poem catalogs exactly how: not through dramatic reversals, but through small reinterpretations. Don't *break* the commandments—just redefine them until they permit everything you wanted to do anyway.

The rhythm is relentlessly iambic tetrameter, the meter of nursery rhymes and hymns. It makes the whole thing sound like catechism, like something you'd memorize in Sunday school. That's the joke—this *is* what Victorian children were actually learning, just never stated this plainly.

The Sixth Commandment's Loophole

"Officiously to keep alive" might be the poem's coldest moment. Clough takes 'Thou shalt not kill' and finds the exact Victorian loophole: you don't have to murder anyone, but you also don't have to be *officious* (meddlesome, overly dutiful) about preventing death.

This was written during the 1860s, when Britain was still debating factory conditions, child labor, and the Irish famine's aftermath. The word "officiously" had legal weight—it described someone who interfered in matters beyond their duty. Clough is capturing the actual argument used against reform: helping the poor, improving working conditions, preventing starvation—all this was 'officious,' an inappropriate interference in natural economic processes.

The parallelism with the adultery couplet is devastating. Both use the same logic: follow the letter of the law (don't kill, don't commit adultery) but avoid any inconvenient extension of its spirit. The commandments become minimum requirements, not moral guides. As long as you're not the one pulling the trigger or signing the death warrant, your hands stay clean.