Dover Beach is a very interesting poem, beautifully put but with a dark and troubled theme. Here I explore some of the key ideas in this work, by Mathew Arnold, and how it connects to some events unfolding in his life.
Dover Beach is a melancholy, pensive poem; hopeless and bleak yet beautiful and artfully worded. It uses the metaphor of an ocean retreating into low tide to illustrate Matthew Arnold’s loss of faith, possibly after the theory of evolution shook his beliefs. This leaves him with nothing to hold onto, and Dover Beach is full of his thoughts of human misery and futility.
Stanza one opens with a quiet, serene scene on the still beaches of an ocean, where the tide is full and the moon graces the shores with its presence. The “sweet” night air beckons across both the French coast and the cliffs of England- “glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay”. This scene possibly represents Mathew Arnold’s life of faith, where things were certain; illuminated by the moonlight, as it were. Someone is invited to come to the window- possibly the “love” mentioned in stanza 4.
This scene of tranquility is abruptly interrupted when the “grating roar” of pebbles that the ocean tosses, flying into the air, quickly changes the mood of the poem to one of unrest. Even the moon, that once lay “fair/ upon the straits” shows a new character, being described as creating a “moon-blanched land”. This startling burst of action brings “the eternal note of sadness in”. The themes of disturbance and solid ground being destroyed, evidenced by the ocean tossing the pebbles that once graced the shore, could allude to faith being destroyed- there is nothing left to hold onto once the “ocean” turns against him.
The next stanza brings in fewer metaphorical and more theological musings to the poem. Arnold says that Sophocles (an Greek tragic playwright) heard the same note of sadness on the Aegean (a part of the Mediterranean Sea) and it brought into his mind the same sea billows of doubt- the “turbid ebb and flow of human misery”.
Next Arnold speaks of “The Sea of Faith” which once clothed the earth with a bright girdle, but is now withdrawing and retreating, leaving the bare shingles of the world behind it. The Sea of Faith points back to the illustration of a sea in the first stanza, and could also refer to the deep waters in Genesis that also covered the earth before God caused the land to form. This reference to Genesis seems to illustrate Arnold’s loss of faith in the waters mentioned there, and his new beliefs leave “naked shingles of the world” behind.
Stanza 4 ends the poem with a thought perhaps more melancholy than all the rest put together, and an idea that is far too prevalent in our culture today. Arnold begs his “love” to “be true/ to one another!” because the world “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light”. Indeed, if there is no hope beyond this world it is a bleak and dreary “darkling plain”. This verse, while sad, does point out the futility of living of the world. The world offers no solace besides itself.
Dover Beach ends with a chaotic picture of meaningless struggles and alarms “of struggle and flight” in the world where “ignorant armies clash by night”. Human ignorance and the aimlessness of life would indeed be hopeless thoughts if there were not something greater to hold onto. Dover Beach stands in sharp contrast to Browning’s “Rabbi Ben Eraza”, where age is welcomed and “the best is yet to be”, for “Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure”.
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