Dover Beach / Matthew Arnold

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"Dover Beach" is a short lyric poem by English poet Matthew Arnold. It was first published in 1867 in the collection New Poems, but surviving notes indicate its composition may have begun as early as 1849. The most likely date is 1851.

The title locale and subject of the poem's descriptive opening lines is the shore of the English ferry port of Dover, Kent facing Calais, France at the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part (21 miles) of the English Channel, where Arnold honeymooned in 1851.

The poem

 * Dover Beach

The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, 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.

Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought Into 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.

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 drear And naked shingles of the world.

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.

– Matthew Arnold

Analysis
"Dover Beach" is a difficult poem to analyze; some of its passages and metaphors have become so well-known that they are hard to see with "fresh eyes". Arnold begins with a naturalistic and detailed nightscape of the beach at Dover in which auditory imagery plays a significant role ("Listen! you hear the grating roar"). The beach, however, is bare, with only a hint of humanity in a light that "gleams and is gone" Reflecting the traditional notion that the poem was written during Arnold's honeymoon (see composition section), one critic notes that "the speaker might be talking to his bride."


 * The sea is calm to-night.
 * The tide is full, the moon lies fair
 * Upon the straits; â€”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-blanch'd 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.

Arnold looks at two aspects of this naturalistic scene, its soundscape (in the first and second stanza) and the retreating actions of the tide (in the third stanza). Arnold hears the sound of the sea as "the eternal note of sadness". Sophocles, a 5th century BC Greek playwright who wrote tragedies of fate and the will of the gods, also heard this same sound as he stood upon the shore of the Aegean Sea. Critics differ widely on how to interpret this image of the Greek Classical age. One critic sees a difference between Sophocles in the classical age of Greece interpreting the "note of sadness" humanistically, while Arnold in the industrial nineteenth century hears in this sound the retreat of religion and faith. A more recent critic connects the two as artists, Sophocles the tragedian, Arnold the lyric poet, each attempting through words to transform this note of sadness into "a higher order of experience."


 * Sophocles long ago
 * Heard it on the Ã†gÃ¦an, and it brought
 * Into 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.

Having examined the soundscape, Arnold turns to the action of the tide itself and sees in its retreat a metaphor for the loss of faith in the modern age once again expressed in an auditory image ("But now I only hear/Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar"). This third stanza begins with an image not of sadness, but of "joyous fulness" similar in beauty to the image with which the poem opens.


 * The Sea of Faith
 * Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
 * Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
 * But now I only hear
 * Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
 * Retreating, to the breath
 * Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
 * And naked shingles of the world.

The final stanza begins with an appeal to love, then moves on to the famous ending metaphor. Critics have varied on their interpretation of the first two lines of this stanza; one calls them a "perfunctory gesture...swallowed up by the poem's powerfully dark picture", while another sees in them "a stand against a world of broken faith". Midway between these is the interpretation of one of Arnold's biographers who describes being "true/To one another" as "a precarious notion" in a world that has become "a maze of confusion" The metaphor with which the poem ends is most likely an allusion to a passage in Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides describes an ancient battle which occurred on a similar beach during the invasion of Sicily by the Athenians. The battle took place at night; the attacking army became disoriented while fighting in the darkness and many of their soldiers inadvertently killed each other. This final image has, also, been variously interpreted by the critics. The "darkling plain" of the final line has been described as Arnold's "central statement" of the human condition A more recent critic has seen the final line as "only metaphor" and, thus, susceptible to the "uncertainty" of poetic language.


 * 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.

"The poem's discourse," Honan tells us, "shifts literally and symbolically from the present, to Sophocles on the Aegean, from Medieval Europe back to the presentâ€”and the auditory and visual images are dramatic and mimetic and didactic. Exploring the dark terror that lies beneath his happiness in love, the speaker resolves to loveâ€”and exigencies of history and the nexus between lovers are the poem's real issues. That lovers may be 'true/To one another' is a precarious notion: love in the modern city momentarily gives peace, but nothing else in a post-medieval society reflects or confirms the faithfulness of lovers. Devoid of love and light the world is a maze of confusion left by 'retreating' faith."

Critics have questioned the unity of the poem, noting that the sea of the opening stanza does not appear in the final stanza, while the "darkling plain" of the final line is not apparent in the opening. Various solutions to this problem have been proffered. One critic saw the "darkling plain" with which the poem ends as comparable to the "naked shingles of the world." While another found the poem "emotionally convincing" even if its logic may be questionable. The same critic notes that "the poem upends our expectations of metaphor" and sees in this the central power of the poem. The poem's historicism creates another complicating dynamic. Beginning in the present it shifts to the classical age of Greece, then (with its concerns for the sea of faith) it turns to Medieval Europe, before finally returning to the present. The form of the poem itself has drawn considerable comment. Critics have noted the careful diction in the opening description, the overall, spell-binding rhythm and cadence of the poem and the dramatic character of the poem. One commentator sees the strophe-antistrophe of the ode at work in the poem, with an ending that contains something of the "cata-strophe" of tragedy. Finally, one critic sees the complexity of the poem's structure resulting in "the first major 'free-verse' poem in the language".

Composition
According to Tinker and Lowry, "a draft of the first twenty-eight lines of the poem" was written in pencil "on the back of a folded sheet of paper containing notes on the career of Empedocles." Allott concludes that the notes are probably from around 1849-50. "Empedocles on Etna," again according to Allott, was probably written 1849-52, the notes on Empedocles are likely to be contemporary with the writing of that poem.

The final line of this draft is:
 * And naked shingles of the world. Ah love &c

Tinker and Lowry conclude that this "seem[s] to indicate that the last nine lines of the poem as we know it were already in existence when the portion regarding the ebb and flow of the sea at Dover was composed." This would make the manuscript "a prelude to the concluding paragraph" of the poem in which "there is no reference to the sea or tides."


 * 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 from pain;
 * And we are here as on a darkling plain
 * Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
 * Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Arnold's visits to Dover may also provide some clue to the date of composition. Allott has Arnold in Dover in June 1851 and again in October of that year "on his return from his delayed continental honeymoon." To critics who conclude that ll. 1-28 were written at Dover and ll. 29-37 "were rescued from some discarded poem," Allott suggests the contrary, i.e. that the final lines "were written at Dover in late June," while " ll. 29-37 were written in London shortly afterwards."

Influence
William Butler Yeats responds directly to Arnold's pessimism in his four-line poem, "The Nineteenth Century and After" (1929):


 * Though the great song return no more
 * There's keen delight in what we have:
 * The rattle of pebbles on the shore
 * Under the receding wave.

Anthony Hecht, US Poet Laureate, replied to "Dover Beach" in his poem "The Dover Bitch".


 * So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
 * With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
 * And he said to her, "Try to be true to me,
 * And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
 * All over, etc. etc."

The anonymous figure to whom Arnold addresses his poem becomes the subject of Hecht's poem. In Hecht's poem she "caught the bitter allusion to the sea", imagined "what his whiskers would feel like / On the back of her neck", and felt sad as she looked out across the channel. "And then she got really angry" at the thought that she had become "a sort of mournful cosmic last resort." After which she says "one or two unprintable things."


 * But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
 * She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
 * And she always treats me right.

Kenneth and Miriam Allott, referring to "Dover Beach" as "an irreverent jeu d'esprit," nonetheless see, particularly in the line "a sort of mournful cosmic last resort," an extension of the original's poem main theme.

"Dover Beach" has been mentioned in a number of novels, plays, poems, and films: The poem is mentioned in:
 * In Dodie Smith's novel, I Capture the Castle (1940), the book's protagonist remarks that Debussy's Clair de Lune reminds her of "Dover Beach" (in the film adaptation of the novel, the character quotes (or, rather, misquotes) a line from the poem).
 * In Fahrenheit 451 (1951), author Ray Bradbury has his protagonist Guy Montag read part of "Dover Beach" to his wife Mildred and her friends in order to show them what literature is about and why books should not be burnt.
 * Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 (1961) alludes to the poem in the chapter "Havermyer": "the open-air movie theater in whichâ€”for the daily amusement of the dyingâ€”ignorant armies clashed by night on a collapsible screen."
 * Ian McEwan quotes part of the poem in his novel Saturday (2005), where the effects of its beauty and language are so strong and impressive that it moves a brutal criminal to tears and remorse. He also seems to have borrowed the main setting of his novella On Chesil Beach (2005) from Dover Beach, additionally playing with the fact that Arnold's poem was composed on his honeymoon (see above).
 * Jakarta by Alice Munro,
 * The Last Gentleman by Walker Percy,
 * A Song For Lya by George R.R. Martin,
 * Rush's song "Armour and Sword", from the album Snakes and Arrows (lyrics by Neil Peart),
 * Nora's Lost, a short drama by Alan Haehnel,
 * Daljit Nagra's prize-winning poem "Look We Have Coming to Dover!" which quotes the line, "So various, so beautiful, so new" as its epigraph,
 * the poem "Moon" by Billy Collins,
 * the travel narrative A Summer in Gascony (2008) by Martin Calder.


 * The Flying Dutchman character quotes the last 12 lines as he looks towards the sea in the movie, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.
 * Kevin Kline's character, Cal Gold, in the film The Anniversary Party recites part of "Dover Beach" as a toast.
 * Samuel Barber composed a setting of "Dover Beach" for string quartet and baritone.

The poem has also provided a ready source for titles:
 * On a Darkling Plain by Clifford Irving, A Darkling Plain by Philip Reeve, As On a Darkling Plain by Ben Bova (the title refers to a Martian plain covered with strange unexplained artifacts), Clash by Night, a play by Clifford Odets (later made into a film noir by Fritz Lang), and Norman Mailer's National Book Award winner The Armies of the Night about the 1967 March on the Pentagon.
 * The Sea of Faith movement is so called as the name is taken from this poem, as the poet expresses regret that belief in a supernatural world is slowly slipping away; the "sea of faith" is withdrawing like the ebbing tide.

Even in the U. S. Supreme Court the poem has had its influence: Justice William Rehnquist, in his concurring opinion in Northern Pipeline Co. v. Marathon Pipe Line Co., 458 U.S. 50 (1982), called judicial decisions regarding Congress's power to create legislative courts "landmarks on a judicial 'darkling plain' where ignorant armies have clashed by night."