Page 371 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes 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 present, 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 love—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”. “Shingles” here means
flat beach cobbles, characteristic of some wave-swept coasts. 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 its dramatic character. 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.

Self Assessment

Multiple Choice Questions:
6. “Dover Beach” is written in:
(a) iambic pentameter. (b) unrhymed free verse.
(c) free verse with occasional rhymes. (d) fully rhymed free verse.

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