Dover Beach.doc

Dover BeachMatthew Arnold 1867Published in New Poems in 1867, “Dover Beach” is one of Matthew Arnolds most famous poems. Many critics believe that Arnold wrote his best poetry in the 1840s and 1850s and that “Dover Beach” was actually composed during this earlier period. Employing one of Arnolds favored metaphors between life and the sea, the poem contrasts the beauty of the moonlit seashore to the angst and uncertainty of life. A sentimental longing for the past and an anxiety about the rapidly changing world characterized much of Victorian literature and thought. Arnolds ability to evoke feelings of isolation, loneliness, and fear of the future accounts for the power of the poem and the reason why scholars believe that it is one of the best works from the Victorian Era.The poem opens as the speaker, commonly assumed to be a man, stands at a window describing the beauty of the seashore to his companion. However, the seascape begins to remind him of his uncertain place in the universe. He mourns the loss of faith in God, which provided security and meaning to people in the past, and compares the passing of faith to the ebb of the tide. The conclusion of the poem provides a solution for the speakers maladies. He beseeches his “love” to be true to him; only in their devotion to each other will they find comfort and certainty in the “confused alarms of struggle and flight” of life.Poem SummaryLines 1-6 Arnold begins the poem with a conventional description of the seashore in the moonlight. The speaker is standing at a window overlooking a stretch of beach in the south of England, near Dover. From there he can see across the English Channel to the French coast just 20 miles away. The moon is full and illuminates the English cliffs standing at the edge of the sea. Arnold writes, “the tide is full,” which seems to imply that the tide is high. The speaker describes this scene to someone else in the room and in Line 6 calls to his companion to join him at the window. In these first six lines Arnold presents a beautiful and tranquil scene. He uses words like “calm,” “fair,” “stand,” and “sweet” to establish this mood.Lines 7-8 Lines 7 and 8 mark a transition in the stanza. The phrase “long line of spray,” which describes what results when the sea meets the land, introduces action and perhaps even contention in the poem.Lines 9-14 In direct contrast to his peaceful and pleasing description of the seashore, the speaker begins to contemplate the movement of the waves. Arnold uses words like “grating roar” and “fling” to achieve a feeling of tension and energy. He moves from the visual images of the first lines to sound descriptions as he details a darker side of the scene. He describes the way the waves pick up pebbles as they move across the shoreline and deposit them again as the tide turns. The endless motion of the waves described in Lines 12-14 evokes sadness in the speaker. “Eternal note of sadness” is echoed again later in the phrase “human misery” in Line 18 and seems to describe the malaise of mankind throughout history rather than the specific problems of the speaker.Lines 15-18 In the opening lines of the second stanza, the speaker considers the Greek tragedy writer Sophocles and wonders if long ago, in ancient Greece, this writer may have sat beside the Aegean Sea and also been reminded of the endless suffering of man. Again, Arnold likens sadness to the constant motion of the sea: “the turbid ebb and flow / of human misery.”Lines 19-20 Lines 19-20 provide a transition from the speakers speculation about Sophocles to the main point of the stanza. Though observing a different sea, the speaker, like Sophocles observing the Aegean, finds a larger message in the motion of the sea. Again, Arnold speaks of the sound of the sea, rather than the visual images of the water.Lines 21-28 In these lines the speaker expresses the idea that watching the sea has elicited. The “Sea of Faith” is a metaphor for the faith in God that comforted humankind in earlier periods. Like the ocean at high tide, which surrounds the land, faith, the poem implies, used to permeate peoples lives. The context of the poem suggests that faith provided meaning and comfort in past ages. However, the “Sea of Faith” has receded like the ebb of the waves. Here Arnold employs such words as “melancholy,” “withdrawing roar,” “retreating,” “drear,” and “naked” to convey a sense of loss and despair, and he uses images of the sea, which he did not employ in the description of the shoreline that opens the poem. The sea is no longer calm, the night air sweet, and the shoreline glimmering in the moonlight. Now the waves roar and the wind blows down the dark and naked shoreline.Lines 29-30 In the opening lines of the third stanza, the speaker addresses his companion directly. He beseeches her that they must comfort each other, be faithful to one another. Only the loyalty and comfort of personal relationships can fill the void produced by the disappearing faith in God.ThemesNature and Its Meaning Prior to the Victorian Era, Wordsworth and his fellow Romantic poets perceived in nature proof of a benign supernatural order, a cosmic design whether Christian or pagan that not only included man but was also sympathetic to him. To these poets, mans spiritual unease was the result of his increasing tendency to turn his eye from nature to alienate himself, in other words, from the very core of his own mystery and thus from the cure to his discontent. By Arnolds time, however, nature had assumed colder intimations. Many of the eras intellectual advances evolutionary theory, sociology, archaeology, and textual criticism of the Bible to name a few had challenged religions explanations for the way the cosmos had originated, functioned, and would proceed in future times. Under the weight of seemingly irrefutable evidence, people gradually were forced to accept that it was science, not religion, that best described nature. Yet science provided even less spiritual comfort than uncertainty had done. In the scientific view, nature was an unyielding mechanical operation, random except for a few basic physical laws. The world was an arena that spared no “special place” for man as the Bible had promised. In fact, man himself was simply the product of evolution, an opportunistic and successful animal, and his presence on earth was secured only because he had survived the battle for the “survival of the fittest.” But science also suggested that nature had long preceded and would long endure mans victory in that battle. Thus, the cosmos was not only oblivious to his presence; it had sewn into its fabric the certitude that man was only an accidental blip doomed to eternal extinction in the vast silence of time.Given the implications of such concepts, Victorians such as Arnold found the need to redress the entire meaning of nature in poetry. In some ways, of course, the natural world remained unchanged. Its beauty and complexity still retained the power to move the human observer and to conjure, as it always had, shades of mans internal life. Yet as science changed mans view of nature and his place in it, so did it alter his conception of the internal life itself the soul. Thus, the pessimistic speaker in “Dover Beach” might genuinely note the “sweetness and light” (Arnolds famous phrase from elsewhere) inherent in the tranquil night scene along Englands shore the moon “fair / Upon the straights,” the cliffs “glimmering and vast” yet at the same time acknowledge that natures beauty barely conceals its darkness. This gloom the world in the end not characterized by light but as a “darkling plain” finds metaphorical expression also in sound, in the “turbid ebb and flow” of the sea that brings “the eternal note of sadness in.” Such noise, including the mechanical processes of the tides, which proceed apace like all of nature and are unaware of any individuals personal stake, remind the speaker that man is essentially on his own left to struggle fruitlessly against the machinelike forces of decay and competition that science has established as natures guiding principles.God and Religion What comfort, then, was left to man if indeed science had supplanted religion? According to the Victorian essayist Thomas Carlyle, the answer was none. “The loss of mans religious belief,” he wrote in Sartor Resartus four years before Queen Victorias coronation, “was the loss of everything.” Devoid of faith, the universe “was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.” Arnolds assessment in “Dover Beach” is only slightly less troubling. From the sound of the sea, which reminds the speaker of the “ebb and flow of human misery,” the speaker conjures a metaphorical contrast between the days of belief and the present, skeptical age. While formerly the “Sea of Faith” was “at the full,” providing man with certainty and hope, now that sea is “retreating, to the breath / Of the night wind,” exposing a dreary and naked world. In such a world, its one great hope removed, none of the smaller, pleasant hopes of past times can survive. While in brief moments of beauty the world “seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams,” such fancy requires the type of belief that is no longer possible given the greater doubt at hand. Gone with faith, in fact, are the joy, love, light, certitude, and peace that are themselves articles of the faithful heart.In light of this, it may seem paradoxical that the speakers one bit of consolation is that lovers might remain “true to one another.” It was natural, however, for the Victorians to conclude that a cosmic order lacking any hands-on divinity required humans to look after one another. Evolution described a world in which not only species but also men struggled against one another in their competition for resources: a world in which “ignorant armies clash by night.”Topics for Further Study Compare the ideas expressed here with those in William Wordsworths “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” also included in Poetry For Students. What conclusions does each speaker draw as a result of his observation of nature? How do these conclusions reflect differing beliefs about nature and about mans place in it? Some literary historians say Arnold wrote “Dover Beach” during his honeymoon in 1851. In what ways does it seem antithetical to a love poem? Based on the last stanza, how would you describe Arnolds opinion of the role of romantic love in the modern world? Arnolds time witnessed an increase in scientific knowledge at the expense of religious faith. His poem is pessimistic about mans state in a post-religious age. If you were to write a similar poem about our own time, what changes would concern you most? What symbols of these changes would you use to express your concern?StyleMatthew Arnold is one of the first poets to experiment with free verse and “Dover Beach” is written in this form. Free verse is a form of poetry in which meter is not used to structure the verse. Instead cadence, syntax, and images play an important role. There are no set number of syllables per line nor a regular rhythmic pattern. A poem written in free verse may have an irregular rhyming structure, as “Dover Beach” does, or may not rhyme at all. Line breaks and stanza formation may appear to be arbitrary, but poets such as Arnold use the irregular structure to emphasize words and meaning and to set a tone. The first two stanzas of “Dover Beach” read more slowly because of the phrasing and sound of the words as Arnold builds the tempo of the poem. His third stanza reads more quickly and thus makes his conclusion more powerful.Historical ContextIn his preface to Poems, published in 1853, Arnold described his age as one of “bewildering confusion” and “spiritual discomfort.” To those living in England in the mid-nineteenth century, the religious skepticism addressed in “Dover Beach” was more than a personal matter to be hashed out in the privacy of ones own soul; it was greater, indeed, than a philosophical controversy between believers and nonbelievers. At stake for Victorians during the eras great religious crisis were the very tenets that defined mans identity: his place in the universe, the moral and ethical principles that guided his behavior toward others, and, by extension, the principles that governed society. To the average Victorian in 1850, Christian precepts provided not only the promise of an afterlife but also a moral code, a standard for judging earthly actions, and even a cosmology in short, an entire worldview. By offering convincing alternatives to Christian doctrine, then, skepticism called into question the way Victorians had previously viewed nearly every aspect of their lives. And while it is true that a large number of Christians remained steadfast throughout the age, the challenges put forth by scientists, biblical scholars, and social theorists combined with the existing churchs unpreparedness to meet such challenges left many Victorians as bewildered as Arnold surmised.Even before Queen Victorias coronation in 1837, the Church of England had embroiled itself in a number of controversies that left it with weakened authority. Itself a dissident movement centuries earlier against what it perceived as extreme papal authority, the Anglican Church itself had grown top-heavy in many ways, its upper echelon generally privileged and therefore removed from the needs of common people. As a result, a number of new “unofficial” churches had splintered away from the official one: the Baptists, the Presbyterians, and the Methodists, to name a few. Members of these churches espoused a variety of beliefs, but in general the Dissenters, as they were called, practiced a more personal and emotional brand of Christianity than did their Anglican counterparts. Because it stressed ones individual relationship with God, the Dissent movement also challenged the political and moral authority of Anglican clerics who had long enjoyed a great deal of power. In the mid-nineteenth century, a new dispute cast the Church of England into further disarray. The Oxford Movement, named after the university town whose intellectuals spearheaded it, asserted that the official church no longer met the needs of its people because it had strayed too far from its origins namely, its first five centuries, before any of Christianitys many schisms. The Oxford scholars advocated a return to a more spiritualized worship, replete with Roman Catholic dogma and trappings that bothered many Anglicans. At last, the leading figure of the Oxford Movement and one of the most respected Anglican churchmen, John Henry Newman, shocked England by converting to Roman Catholicism. Though his departure effectively ended the Oxford Movement, the debate he sparked caused many Anglicans to become concerned with esoteric issues within the church just when several major threats to Christianity were gathering force in the secular world.One such threat was the growing acceptance of a purely materialistic school of thought known as Utilitarianism. Utilitarians, also called Benthamites, espoused the ideas of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who proposed that all social, political, and economic realities were based on peoples self-interest. According to Bentham, a person chose a given action based not on its potential moral or ethical outcome, but rather on its likelihood to bring pleasure instead of pain. By extension, society as a whole functioned according to the collective self-interest of its members. Thus, theUtilitarians motto, “the greatest happiness for the greatest number,” stood in direct contrast with religious doctrine, which held that virtue, not happiness, was the ideal motivating force behind human behavior. Another set of ideas that threatened church doctrine were those associated with Thomas Malthus, himself a cleric as well as an economic theorist. Malthus, whose views formed the basis for what Victorians called “political economy,” speculated that scarcity of resources combined with overpopulation among the poorer classes would eventually create mass poverty. In the mid-nineteenth century, his prediction seemed to be coming true. Industrial growth had created teeming factory towns across northern England, and despite the wealth these factories generated, the living conditions of workers seemed to be growing worse. Malthusians held that the workers poverty was a product of their tendency to have too many children. Further, they believed that social reform and welfare would only encourage more procreation by decreasing the mortality rate among the poor. This belief also ran counter to church tenets, which advocated charity toward the poor and the notion that all people possessed equal value in Gods eyes.But if Benthamism and political economy, two critical approaches to worldly matters, both represented the increasingly scientific outlook Victorians advocated, neither challenged the premises of religious belief directly. These premises, of course, were contained in the Bible, which for a long time was accepted as not only a collection of moral assertions, but also as an accurate history of the way the universe and man had originated. Yet a new science called into question the validity of the Bible itself. The “higher criticism,” as it was known, asserted that the Bible was a human rather than a divine document. Using the kind of textual analysis developed by Renaissance thinkers, first German and then English scholars determined that much of the matter contained in the Old and New Testaments failed the test of scientific scrutiny that it could not be “true” in the literal sense. Though religious authorities dismissed the scholars claims, archaeological discoveries seemed to prove