Page 370 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 30: Tennyson, Arnold and Yeats

Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land, Notes
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 sounds cape (in the first and second stanza)
and the retreating action of the tide (in the third stanza). He hears the sound of the sea as “the
eternal note of sadness”. Sophocles, a 5th century BC Greek playwright who wrote tragedies on 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 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.
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 in 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

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