Dover Beach

Along with Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was one of the most respected writers of the Victorian period (1832-1901). His reputation as an important poet and essayist was highly valued through most of the twentieth century. These days, fewer and fewer students read or study his works. The poem that everyone should read is “Dover Beach.” Arnold and his wife spent their honeymoon at his hotel in Dover overlooking the English Channel, which became his inspiration for the poem. In his most famous poem, the major anxieties of the nineteenth-century resonate with particular power:

                         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 noon-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 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.

The poem begins with the speaker observing a peaceful scene: “The “sea is calm…out in the tranquil bay.” (1-5) He calls his love to the window to share this view, but instead of directing her eyes toward the moonlight, he tells her to “Listen!” to the “grating roar / Of pebbles” tumbling against the shoreline. This sound draws him from his initial serenity and induces his imagination to hear “The eternal note of sadness” in the waves. He gives shape and gravity to what he means by “eternal note of sadness” in the next stanza by alluding to the Greek playwright Sophocles. For Sophocles, human beings’ lives were governed by fate and life could be beset by tragedy no matter what actions a person took, as he demonstrates in his most famous play Oedipus Rex.

As a Victorian writing in the aftermath of Darwin’s writings and the erosion of religious faith, Arnold’s faced a world of changing beliefs that differed profoundly from those held by men and women who lived a generation before him. Born into a Victorian family with a father who was a devout Christian clergyman and historian, Arnold was raised with the traditional Anglican faith of the time, but as he grew older his faith weakened and the rapidly changing world sowed uncertainty and doubt within his mind. What meaning could life have without the beneficent god who cared for humanity? In stanzas 3 and 4, this absence of the Chrisian God possessed his thoughts and filled him with the dread he voices in the last lines of the poem. Today, a new god has risen, artificial intelligence. Its creators blithely assert that it will replace love, faith and poetry. But this deity will provide no more “joy,” “love,” or “light,” than the god that left Arnold alone to look across the sea and imagine those “ignorant armies” fighting wars as destructive and meaningless as the ones armies continue to undertake.  

A Milton Sonnet

 In 1632, just past his twenty-third birthday, John Milton (1608-1674) seems to have had a touch of anxiety. Seven years earlier, he entered Christ College Cambridge and embarked on his studies. His intention was to take holy orders and become a Protestant minister. He worked his way through a Bachelor of Arts (1629) and a Master of Arts (1632). As he matured, Milton steeped himself in great literature. He read rapaciously and absorbed the poetry of Homer, Virgil, Edmund Spenser, and Shakespeare, to name a few. His love of these great poets most certainly affected his thinking and inspired him to compose his early great poems “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” “On Shakespeare,” “L’Allegro,” and “Il Penseroso.” It was during this period that the trajectory of his life seems to have swerved from the path of a religious career to one dedicated to poetry. Of course, as with so many young people, Milton looked toward the future and worried over the choice he would make. His father wondered why at twenty-three Milton had yet to begin his career as a minister, which increased his angst. Perhaps to rationalize his delay and restrain his anxiety Milton wrote his sonnet, “How soon hath Time”:

                            Sonnet VII
How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
   Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!
   My hasting days fly on with full career,
   But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
   That I to manhood am arrived so near;
   And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
   that some more timely-happy spirits endueth.
Yet, be it less or more, or soon or slow,
   It shall be still in strictest measure even
   To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of heaven,
   All is, if I have grace to use it so,
   As ever in my great task-master's eye.

The opening two lines make a familiar claim. Even when young, time moves faster than anticipated and surprises a person who suddenly feels shuttled into adulthood. Here, “Time” is a “subtle thief of youth” and has “Stolen on his wing [Milton’s] three-and-twentieth year.” “Stolen” is grammatically the verb of subject “Time,” and means robbed; but interestingly the word also works as an adjective meaning sneaked. Why does Milton feel ambushed by “Time”? Lines 3 and 4 explain: “My hasting days fly on with full career, / But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth”: Milton had passed his 23rd birthday, but what had he to show for it? By this time in his life he was expected, particularly by his father, to begin a ministry in the church, but he kept postponing taking holy orders. His father and his university friends wondered why he had not and questioned him about his delay.

Milton was realizing that a religious ministry might not be what he envisioned himself pursuing. He had begun to feel that his true “calling” could be to write poetry. Milton’s metaphor of “But my late spring no bud or blossom shewth” acknowledges he should be more advanced along his religious “career,” but has nothing to show for his years of study. In lines 5-8, Milton admits he looks much younger than he is, “Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,” and believes his contemporaries are endowed (“endueth”) with more maturity (“ripeness”) than he. Milton looking outward at his appearance and looking inward at his maturity reverberates his uneasiness about where he should be in life. He is close to “manhood” but is trailing his contemporaries socially, who by the age of twenty-three were expected to be well along in the career they had chosen. These lines complete the octave of the sonnet and what follows is the sestet.

In the next six lines, Milton turns away from scrutinizing himself and contemplates what his lack of progress means philosophically and theologically. He conceives of his life’s progress as determined and measured by the flow of “Time” and the “will of heaven.” Being a religious Calvinist when he wrote this poem, Milton believed that he needed God’s grace, but equally important was how he “use” God’s grace constructively. As he sees it, whatever he chooses to do with his life can fulfill God’s will, his “great task-master” who watches over all he does. Still, the confidence Milton reaches for in the last two lines probably did not convince himself and certainly does not convince the reader. In the end he certainly chose well.