Dover Beach

Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold, is one of the finest short poems of the 19th century, even one of most famous poems written in the English language. First published in 1867, in the collection, New Poems, its condensed 39 lines with a subtly interwoven and shifting rhyme have a memorable theme: the crisis of faith in the mid-Victorian world, which was generated by German biblical scholarship of the Higher Criticism and the unsettling revolution of Darwinism.

First in six lines the poet evokes the moonlit seascape of the English Channel, tranquil and sweet, and the reassuring "cliffs of England." "Only," opening the seventh line, begins the transition, unfolding through the "tremulous cadence" of the waves to the "eternal note of sadness." Sophocles. The Aegean. Such Anglo-Grecian connections are only momentarily relevant "by this distant northern sea," for this is the Sea of Faith— or was, and that image withdraws in its turn and the vision turns windy, vast, naked and drear. "Ah love..." here the accumulated poetry conveys the momentary view that love is the bulwark against the uncertainties of the modern (Victorian) world— the solution the Victorian reader expected— "only" Arnold then undercuts this declaration with a powerful despairing litany of the failure of culture, to end with the chilling prophetic imagery of the last three lines.

The sea is calm to-night.

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 moon-blanch'd land,

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 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.

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.

Arnold's economy is extraordinary, in this most un-Victorian Victorian poem: not a single purely decorative image, not an adjective that distracts from the cumulative thought and effect. Arnold in the 20th century has been mocked as the "Apostle of High Seriousness." One of our own central genres is travesty: Anthony Hecht, US Poet Laureate from 1982 to 1984, purposively missing the deeper seriousness of Arnold's vision, offered a glib ironic reply, in a much-noted poem "Dover Bitch," where the subject of Arnold's adoration resists the notion of being used as a "cosmic last resort."

"Dover Beach" has been better served by a fine setting of Samuel Barber's.