DOVER BEACH - Matthew Arnold

Dover Beach 

Written in 1851, Dover Beach is Matthew Arnold's best-known poem. It was inspired by two visits he and his wife Frances made to the south coast of England, where the white cliffs of Dover stand, just twenty-two miles from the coast of France.

This poem of consists of 39 lines, addresses the decline of religious faith in the modern world and offers the fidelity of affection as its successor. Many claim it to be a honeymoon poem and that is understandable because romantic love, albeit (although) of a Victorian nature, features strongly. But there's no doubt the poem goes much deeper, into the notion of happiness and humanity's spiritual state.

The speaker laments the loss of true Christian faith in England during the mid-1800s as science captured the minds of the public. The speaker, considered to be Matthew Arnold himself, begins by describing a calm and quiet sea out in the English Channel. He stands on the Dover coast and looks across to France where a small light can be seen briefly, and then vanishes. This light represents the diminishing faith of the English people and those in the world around them. Throughout the poem the speaker crafts an image of the sea receding and returning to land with the faith of the world as it changes throughout time. At this point in time though, the sea is not returning. It is receding farther out into the strait. 

Faith used to encompass the whole world, holding the populous (overcrowded) tight in its embrace. Now though, it is losing ground to the sciences, particularly those related to evolution (The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin was published in 1859). The poem concludes pessimistically as the speaker makes clear to the reader that all the beauty and happiness that one may believe they are experiencing is not in fact real. The world is actually without peace, joy, or help for those in need and the human race is too distracted by its own ignorance to see where true assistance is needed anymore. 

SUMMARY:

One night, the speaker of "Dover Beach" sits with a woman inside a house, looking out over the English Channel near the town of Dover. They see the lights on the coast of France just twenty miles away, and the sea is quiet and calm. The poem represents the clash between science and religion. It opens with a beautiful naturalistic scene. The poet (speaker) stands on the cliffs of Dover Beach. He is gazing out at the majesty of the beauty of nature. Sadness is creeping in, and the poet is reminding us about how recent scientific discoveries have forever changed human values in the relation to nature. In this way, he brings science and faith into conflict. The poem presents all the theology and scientific theory with the message that all such things in the world can’t make life meaningful if there is no love.

When the light over in France suddenly extinguishes, the speaker focuses on the English side, which remains tranquil. He trades visual imagery for aural imagery, describing the "grating roar" of the pebbles being pulled out by the waves. He finishes the first stanza by calling the music of the world an "eternal note of sadness."

The next stanza flashes back to ancient Greece, where Sophocles heard this same sound on the Aegean Sea and was inspired by it to write his plays about human misery. It was the tradition of Victorians to refer to classical poets and writers in their works. The poet says that Sophocles had already heard this eternal note of sadness while sitting on the shores of the Aegean.

‘The turbid ebb and flow” mean the movement of water in and out. It also refers to the loss of Faith. Sophocles compared eternal movement with the miseries of humans which like them are also never-ending. This is how he succeeded in composing painful tragedies. According to the poet, he can hear the same sound of sea sand and retreating tide by sitting, like Sophocles, on the shore of the Northern Sea (English Channel). Distinct means far from Sophocles. The term ‘We’ in a context refers to the poet and his bride but in a broader sense, it refers to every human. In this sense, the poet draws out attention to the universality and eternity of sadness.

Stanza three introduces the poem's main metaphor, with: "The Sea of Faith/Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore." The phrase suggests that faith is fading from society like the tide is from the shore. The speaker laments this decline of faith through melancholy diction. He hears its sadness, longings and roars of pulling away of faith as the night wind is hovering over the sky. What remains there are the naked stones which have been pulled out of the earth by the tides. The poet is mixing the natural happening with human faith. As we know the poem was written during the Victorian age. At that time there was a development of industrialisation that led to capitalism which further led to individualism and greed.

In the final stanza, the speaker directly addresses his beloved who sits next to him, asking that they always be true to one another and to the world that is laid out before them. He warns, however, that the world's beauty is only an illusion since it is in fact a battlefield full of people fighting in absolute darkness.

The poet believes that the world which was like the Land of Dreams or how he described it, in the beginning, is, in reality, hollow from the inside. There is no joy, love, light, certainty, peace, or sympathy in it. Both the poet and his beloved are on a ‘darkling plain’ i.e. a dark and ugly world. They hear the sound of struggle and fights of the people who are fighting without seeing each other. This fight can be regarded as the fight of opposing ideologies in the mind of man or that of forces of materialism or trivial battles of age and youth or also selfish and political forces. The poem thus ends with the terrible picture of society during the Victorian Age.

Bibliography

Arnold, M. (2021). Dover Beach. In S. Lohani, Visions: A Thematic Anthology (pp. 14-17). Kathmandu, Nepal: Vidhyarthi Pustak Bhandar.

Bladwin, E. (2021, 11 12). Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold. Retrieved from Poem Analysis: https://poemanalysis.com/matthew-arnold/dover-beach/

Spacey, A. (2021, November 12). Analysis of the Poem "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold. Retrieved from Owlcation: https://owlcation.com/humanities/Summary-and-Analysis-of-Poem-Dover-Beach-by-Matthew-Arnold