by Kerry Michael Wood

Created on: July 02, 2008   Last Updated: June 20, 2011

Matthew Arnold's poem Dover Beach opens with an image of the literal sea or English Channel. The time is night. The sea is calm. The moon shines brightly and lights can be seen on the French coast. We are lulled by the pleasant connotations of words like calm, fair, and tranquil. The night air is sweet; the tide is high.

With line nine comes a modulation to a minor chord, a shift toward despair as the sense of hearing is invoked. The scenic beauty is accompanied by the grating roar/ Of pebbles that the waves draw back and fling. He invites his beloved to come to the window and listen. They hear a tremulous cadence that brings the eternal note of sadness.

To accent the eternal quality, he begins stanza two with a reference to Sophocles, who heard human misery in the ebb and flow of the Aegean nearly 2000 years earlier. In dramas such as Oedipus Rex, wherein the wisest of men, the solver of the riddle of the sphinx, realizes that he doesn't even know his own identity and has unwittingly slain his father and sired children with his mother.

With stanza three the actual sea becomes a metaphor for the Sea of Faith, which once was full but now has ebbed. Faith means not only Faith in God and religion but also trust in people, in society, in government, and the movement of civilization toward a better and more peaceful world. Despair weights the negative connotations of words like melancholy, withdrawing roar Retreating vast edges drear/ And naked shingles (pebbled beaches).

How can mankind stem or reverse a force of nature? Our only relief from spiritual darkness, the anguish, terror, and solitude is to be found in love and fidelity to another person. It's not much two people facing calamity together but it is better than every man for himself.

The beauty of the poem's beginning is, on closer inspection, illusory. The long line of spray actually is filed with pebbles. The moon-blanched land is a drear and naked shingle a battleground where ignorant armies clash by night, not in orderly battle or intellectual disputation but in a confusion of cross-purposes, where allies are indistinguishable from enemies.

All of mankind's intellectual achievements have brought us no closer to God, no nearer to the prelapsarian paradise to which we vainly aspire. In earthly beauty there is no anodyne for suffering. Comfort can be found only in the joined hands of lovers.

Who would ever think a poem could be so lyrically gorgeous when its subject matter is abject depression brought on by loss of faith? Matthew Arnold somehow accomplishes it. Though Dover Beach speaks to problems and attitudes of the present day, it should be considered in the historical perspective of its time.

Arnold did not agree with Thomas Malthus' ideas on population and poverty nor with Adam Smith's ruthless self-interest. Once he outgrew his dandyism, he felt intensely the confusion of the world and hoped that his poetry might help to inspirit and rejoice its readers. He probably wrote Dover Beach in 1851 when he and his newlywed wife twice visited the town and its chalk cliffs. It is important that this is England's closest point to France, only twenty-two miles away.

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