Poems, Poetry, and Poets
Poetry is when an emotion
has found its thought & the thought has found its words- Robert Frost
Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold- a Victorian
thinker
The sea is calm
tonight.
The tide is full, and 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
STANZA ONE: The sea
seems calm, the tide is full. The moon is referred to as fair denoting beautiful
and white. It is seen in between the way of seas i.e. upon the straits and
beside the French coast, the light gleams for some time while the other time, it
is gone. The poet then views that from the cliffs of England, the light
glimmers which keeps in alignment with the tranquil bay.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the
Ægean, and it brought
In 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.
STANZA TWO: Poet
then, refers, to Sophocles who might have heard the same sound when Sophocles
sat nearby the Aegean sea and that might have bought him thoughts of misery.
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 of drear
And naked shingles
of the world.
STANZA THREE: The
sea of faith might once have had full of high tides. But now, the poet upon
hearing the roar of sound fills him with melancholic sound. Maybe, the poet is
trying to give us the message that the faith and beliefs which once used to
rule the world are now slowly fading away. Just like the ocean water is reducing
its way from its edges, it seems that faith in the world is also reducing.
And the only thing that remains is shingles ie. large-sized blackish stones,
ie. mainly seen in the areas where there is no water.
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.
STANZA FOUR: The
poet in the last stanza, reflects on how the world has turned weary and full of
despise. The world that we actually imagine is no truer, no more
beautiful, and no more joyful. The land of our dreams is ultimately shattered as
now, the world has grown without love, without certitude i.e. without trust and
without peace or help for pain. The final message is that the world is suffering
from the loss of humanity as a whole and the poet sensing these dreary things
makes him contemplate and thus, he wrote a poem. The poem talks about love but
that too seems illusion. The heart of the poem itself has lost all the confidence that once dared to explain the religion, its values, and its
experiences that are supposed to bind us together.
Technicalities:
Stanza: four
Rhyme Scheme:
ABACDBDCEFCGFG
Alliteration: full,
fair, gleams, glimmer, lie, land, love, le,t, etc.
Assonance: and,
again, only of, etc.
Caesura (pause):
look at commas or inverted commas.
ENJAMBMENT (run on
lines): look at the incomplete phrase
SIMILES (two things
compared with ‘like’): look at lines with, referring to (like or as)
Metaphor: faith is
compared with the sea etc.
Style: Free Verse
Themes: Loss of
faith, love, nature & alienation, and misery.
Symbols: Land- continuity, Sea- change, Dover- a place of
name and beach