Page 367 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes Hearing it by this distant northern sea. 20

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.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world which seems 30
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, 1867)
The opening stanza of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” is a soothing description of what is believed
to be Matthew Arnold looking out the window of his honeymoon cottage over a moonlit pebble
beach of the Dover area of Southeastern England. All, save for the last line, is poetic romanticism at
its finest; describing the “moon-blanch’d land” (8) as it’s rhythmically washed by the sea, and the
sound of the rasping pebbles echoing across the shoreline. The opening stanza of “Dover Beach” is
meant to lull the reader into a peaceful composure, imagining the scene with the entire divine
splendor that Arnold was writing with. The final line, however, Matthew Arnold ominously calls
this scenery the medium that brings “the eternal note of sadness in” (14); the emotional music, that
carries with it spiritual manna, bares the stinging bitter-sweet realization that none of it is actually
real.
Sophocles (495 – 406), the Greek tragedy playwright, is described by Matthew Arnold as hearing
the same sound in the Mediterranean when inspired to write his tragedies such as Antigone, King
Oedipus, and Electra. Arnold describes it as having “brought into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
of human misery” (16). This comparison to Sophocles’ Theban plays, in their pitiless misfortunes,
foreshadows the mood of the following stanzas. The touching enchantment of first devout stanza
of “Dover Beach” is now enveloped by the ugly and secular truth of the world. Matthew Arnold
describes the “sea of faith” (20), the divine protection of religious devotion, as an encompassing
“bright girdle furl’d” (22) that is now retreating before human reason, “the breath of the night-
wind” (25).

Write about the final stanza of the poem, Dover Beach.
In the final stanza of “Dover Beach”, Matthew Arnold writes “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, or light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;”

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