Dover Beach

Assignment for Mr. Tame's English Literature Class


Dover Beach

by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight,
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-blanched 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 Agean, 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 furled.
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.

An Analysis of <Dover Beach> by Matthew Arnold, 1867

Sung Jiyun

            Close my eyes and I become the poet, gazing at a distant glimmer. The deep black water reflects the pale moon. A dim sound of the waves breaking hits my ears and knocks on my heart. I suddenly remember Sophocles and his thoughts about human misery flows, and feel my heart drop. I fall in the swamp of melancholy. Sad it is, the fate of humans, swaying and shaking endlessly like the waves. We cannot resist the moon’s power.

Once, there was a time when all people believed firmly in God; humans believed to be under protection of God, comforting and assuring. Yet doubts, especially raised by scientific challenges in the Victoria Age, destroyed that comfort with throwing pebbles. The only way we get out of this is true love. And we need not worry, for when there is an ebb, there is a full; the right time will come someday. The world up front is full of lies, but we must dream of bringing back joy, love, light, certitude, peace, and help for pain we lost.

           Now, to raise such emotions, the poet does not just say so; he uses description of metaphors and many other figures of speech and links to his own memories and thoughts. He carefully places the most appropriate vocabularies to derive the flow he intended. For instance, throughout the poem, if one reads it aloud, there are certain strong metres that come right before normal weak ones. Such technic is called ‘iambs’, referring to ‘an unstressed syllable flowed by a stressed syllable’, often used in a serious tone. With repetitive combination of iambs and anapest- two unstressed and one stressed syllable- the poet succeeds in creating a melancholy tone, making our minds solemn at the heavy fate in front of us.

Apart from such linguistic skills, we can find some efforts of figurative speech, such as alliteration, parallel structure, rhyming words, metaphors, or anaphora. The poet is exceptionally skilled in metaphors, which helps us imaging the sight he sees. For example, when he says ‘“Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight where ignorant armies clash by night’, we can refer that there are people fighting without evening knowing what are they fighting for. What touched my mind the most was the phrase ‘With tremulous cadence slow, and bring/ The eternal note of sadness in.’ I could feel the beat of the waves coming in and out, making a melancholy melody.

           For better understanding, we also need to interpret the poem from an external perspective- in other words, not just reading the poem by itself, but with the background knowledge about the poet, the society at that time, etc. Matthew Arnold, the poet, is known to write his poem during or right after a honeymoon with his wife to Southern England region where Dover is located. It was a time known as the Victorian Era, right after romanticism, when the Industrial Revolution and other scientific developments were going on, and artist of the time are well-known to be decadent. Matthew Arnold is especially famous for his sharp criticism along with extreme solitude and sorrow.

           The first time I read this poem, I did not have a clue what it is talking about. But as I tried to feel the poem for what it is and sense the images it provides, as I examined the poem thoroughly so that I could find some techniques of writing a poem, and as I looked up for Matthew Arnold and his ethnic background, I started to understand the poem inch by inch. What I learned is if there is an abstruse piece, it helps to analyze it into different aspects so that once all of it is combined, a reasonable interpretation is created. The poem is indeed very solemn and depressing. However, surely what the poet intended is not all that- at least, I understood that way. He leaves it to the readers.