“Dover Beach” is a brief,
dramatic monologue generally recognized as Arnold’s the best and the most
widely known poem. It begins with an opening stanza that is indisputably one of
the finest examples of lyric poetry in the English language. The topography of
the nocturnal setting is a combination of hushed tranquility and rich sensory
detail. It is the world as it appears to the innocent eye gazing on nature:
peaceful, harmonious, suffused with quiet joy. The beacon light on the coast of
Calais (France), the moon on the calm evening waters of the channel, and the
sweet scent of the night air all suggest a hushed and gentle world of silent
beauty. The final line of the stanza, however, introduces a discordant note, as
the perpetual movement of the waves suggests to the speaker not serenity but
“the eternal note of sadness.”
The melancholic strain
induces in the second stanza an image in the mind of the speaker: Sophocles,
the Greek tragedian, creator of Oedipus Rex standing in the
darkness by the Aegean Sea more than two thousand years ago.
The ancient master of tragedy hears in the eternal flux of the waves of the
same dark note….
“The turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery.”
Thus, the speaker, like Sophocles before
him, perceives life as tragedy; suffering and misery are inextricable elements
of existence. Beauty, joy, and calm are ephemeral and illusory. The speaker’s
pessimistic perspective on the human condition, expressed in stanzas two,
three, and four, undercuts and effectively negates the positive, tranquil
beauty of the opening stanza; the reality subsumes the misleading appearance.
In the third stanza, Arnold introduces the metaphor of the “Sea of Faith,” the
once abundant tide in the affairs of humanity that has slowly withdrawn from
the modern world. Darwinism and Tractarianism in Arnold’s nineteenth century
England brought science into full and successful conflict with religion. “Its
melancholy, long withdrawing roar” suggested to Arnold the death throes of the
Christian era. The Sophoclean tragic awareness of fate and painful existence
had for centuries been displaced by the pure and simple faith of the Christian
era, a temporary compensation promising respite from an existence that is
ultimately tragic.
The fourth and final stanza
of “Dover Beach” is extremely pessimistic. Its grim view of reality, its
negativity, its underlying desperate anguish is in marked contrast to the joy
and innocent beauty of the first stanza. Love, the poet suggests, is the one
final truth, the last fragile human resource. Yet here, as the world is
swallowed by darkness, it promises only momentary solace, not joy or salvation
for the world. The world, according to the speaker, “seems/ To lie before us
like a land of dreams,” offering at least an appearance that seems “So various,
so beautiful, so new,” but it is deceptive, a world of wishful thinking. It is
shadow without substance, offering neither comfort nor consolation. In this
harsh existence, there is
“Neither joy, nor love, nor
light,
Nor certitude, nor
peace, nor help for pain.”
Arnold closes the poem with
the famous lines that suggest the very nadir of human existence; few poems have
equaled its concise, sensitive note of poignant despair. Humanity stands on the
brink of chaos, surrounded in encroaching darkness by destructive forces and
unable to distinguish friend from foe. The concluding image of the night battle
suggests quite clearly the mood of the times among those who shared Arnold’s intellectual
temperament, and it is one with which they were quite familiar.
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