Soundpoem -- high bandwidth advised
“Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;--on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Matthew Arnold's (1822-1888) best-known poem, “Dover Beach” (1867) is a “masterpiece of mood”, both a love poem and an elegy. Though published in his 1867 volume New Poems, “Dover Beach” may have been composed as early as 1851, when Arnold honeymooned at Dover.
The sea is used as both an image and a metaphor. The first stanza has the narrator of the poem inviting his lover to look at the sea through the window with him. It is a peaceful moment: “Come to the window, sweet is the night air”. However, nothing is as solid as it appears, and the imagery soon becomes that of an eroding shore-line and light that “gleams and is gone”. This erosion is also reflected in the poem's form, which is a series of incomplete sonnets. “Dover Beach” then is technically neither free verse nor strictly formal verse.
The waves of the sea remind the poem's narrator that Sophocles also wrote about the sea and the misery of his civilisation. This leads to the narrator's own melancholy and thoughts of faithlessness that intrude when he is with his lover. The sea then becomes the Sea of Faith, a symbol for a time when religion could still be experienced without the doubts brought about by progress and science. By the middle decade of the C19th British confidence had reached its highest point. Commanding a great empire, the home of Science and Industry, and the producer of great literature, many of the inhabitants belived they populated the greatest nation of the earth. Yet by the 1860s this great confidence had begun to wane. Charles Darwin' s On the Origin of Species, while not universally acclaimed, had shaken the belief in a benevolent deity as the creator of all. Even for those who attempted to combine religion with an acceptance of evolution, the new theory still posed the difficulty that man seemed no longer the pinnacle of creation. This crisis of confidence and the depression that seeped into British intellectual life is found emerging in Arnold's poem.
The third stanza is particularly elegiac, with the imagery of the receding tide: “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”, that is linked to the loss of certainty, and manifests in the narrator with a plea for truth from his lover. The sadness in the poem intensifies as the poem reaches its conclusion. There is a sense of the narrator being caught between the letting go of a set of beliefs before they have been replaced by another.
It is a poem of religious doubt, and a classic text of Victorian anxiety over lost faith. “Dover Beach” was written after Tennyson's own epic of Victorian doubt, In Memoriam (1850), and is also typical of Victorian modes of writing in that it shifts seamlessly from the realistic to the symbolic. “Dover Beach” is also representative of Arnold's frustrated desire to find an authentic and authoritative language. He is strongly influenced by Wordsworth (evident through Arnold's sense of epiphany).