Dover Beach - Matthew Arnold
Composed in 1851, Dover Beach is Matthew Arnold's best poem. It is inspired by two visits he and his wife Frances make to the south coast of England, where the white cliffs of Dover stand, just twenty-two miles from the coast of France. This poem consists of 39 lines, and 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 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 persona laments the loss of true Christian belief 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.
The persona 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 tight in its embrace. Now though, it is losing ground to the sciences, particularly those related to evolution. It ends sadly when the persona makes clear that all the beauty and happiness that one may believe are experiencing is not in fact real.
SUMMARY: One night, the speaker sits with a woman inside a house, looking out over the English Channel near the town of Dover, and sees the lights on the coast of France just twenty miles away that the sea is quiet and calm. The poem reveals the clash between science and religion. It opens with a beautiful naturalistic scene. The speaker stands on the cliffs of Dover Beach, who 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 relation to nature. In this way, he brings science and faith into conflict.
As the light over in France suddenly extinguishes, the speaker focuses on the English side that remains tranquil. He trades visual 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 Aegean as well.
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. So he succeeded in composing painful tragedies. The persona hears the same sound of sea sand and retreating tide by sitting, like Sophocles, on the Shore of the Northern Sea. Distant means far from Sophocles. Stanza three introduces the poem's main metaphor, The Sea of Faith/Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore, suggesting 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 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 the human faith.
The poem was written during the Victorian age. At that time there was a development of industrialization 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, sympathy in it. Both the poet and his beloved are on a darkling plain. 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.