by Neil Deo

Created on: July 01, 2008   Last Updated: July 04, 2008

This anlysis is entirely original, and I have recalled what high school teachers said about Matthew Arnold's famous poem, "DOVER BEACH<" withour reading anything about the poem in deacdes. I hope that anyone who reads my article will be able to appreciate a poem, rather than details about the writer/poet or history, or even the precise date the poem was written. If poetry analysis is to be true, original and helpful to newcomers to poetry, I can help by writing in a simple but direct way about the poem itself. In my analysis the poem "Dover Beach" is central, not any historical period or person. The latter will come from research, not clear reading and appreciation of words/poetry.

Matthew Arnold has given us an intimate, eternal poem, or one with long-lasting lines. "Dover Beach" connects everything in its 37 lines, especially religious themes. In a way, it is most appropriate that Arnold begins with the element that dominates our existence by sheer percentage on this planet, "The sea...."

"DOVER BEACH
By Matthew Arnold

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 moon-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 Agean, 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 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."

When I was in high school, my teacher said this poem has a "melancholic tone." The words of Line 14 seem to give

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