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.