1. INTRODUCTION

 

In this paper on the Victorian poetry, I’m going to talk about Matthew Arnold who wrote during this period. He is sometimes called the third great Victorian poet, behind Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning.

(cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Arnold)

 

The poem that I have chosen in order to analyse it is Dover Beach (1867) because I think that it reflects the things that I would like to show: his general disillusionment with the world, his relation with the religion, etc.

 

Another aspect that interests me is the relation between this Victorian poet and the Romanticism because it is said that Arnold was the bridge between Romanticism and Modernism.

(cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Arnold)

 

 

2. THE POEM

 

As I have said before I’m going to analyze Dover Beach of Matthew Arnold which was written in 1867 and describes a horrible World in which the religious ideas are a failure.

(cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Arnold)

Dover Beach

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-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 A gaean, 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.(1867)

(c.f. http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/writings/doverbeach.html)

 

3. ANALYSIS OF THE POEM

 

3.1. THE TITLE

 

It is said that may have been written when Arnold visited Dover. I think this is the cause because he named the poem we are going to analyse Dover Beach.

 

3.2. THEMES

 

In my opinion, the main theme of the poem is melancholy because along the poem we can read a lot of expressions and words describing this melancholic feeling. Another theme at which is important to pay attention is the faith. The author shows us it through the “Sea of Faith”. Due to the different changes that the modernity brought, the people of the time had lost the faith.

 

3.3. STRUCTURE

 

 The writer divided the poem into four stanzas of different number of verses. The 1st stanza (14 lines) is about the author description of the sea that he is observing and the thoughts that come at his mind while he is observing it.

At the 2nd stanza, he continues describing the sea that transmits us a calm feeling and at the 3rd one is the first time that the faith theme appears at the text.

And at the end of the poem, he is saying that definitely, the people have lost the faith.

 

3.4. STYLE

 

3.4.1. COMMUNICATIVE STRUCTURE

 

The speaker of the poem is Matthew Arnold because we can observe some marks that demonstrate it. For example in line 24 “I” and in line 35 “we”.

 

By analysing the verbal tenses we can find that at the beginning and at the end of the poem, he uses the present tenses and at the 2nd and 3rd stanza he uses the past ones.

 

3.4.2 COHESION

 

There are sentences coordinated by “and” as for example in lines 12, 13, 16, 28 and 35. We can also find subordinated sentences in lines 8, 37 and 30 with the pronouns “where” and “which”.

 

As rhetorical devices, I have found some metaphors. The main metaphor of the text is “the Sea of Faith” in line 21 because this sentence is one of the clues of the meaning of the poem. Another metaphor could be “a bright girdle furled” (line 23) which help him to emphasize that faith.

I would like to mention too the anaphora of lines 4 and 5 where the author underlines the harmonious atmosphere of the first lines.

 

3.4.3. LEXIS AND SEMANTICS

 

 

We can notice that there are two different lexical fields throughout the poem. One is about the BEACH “Sea of Faith” (line 21), “tide”  (line 2), “sea” (lines 1 and 8), “coast” (line 3), “bay” (line 6), “spray” (line 7), “sand “(line 8), “waves” (line 10), “ebb and flow” (line 17) and  “northern sea” (line 20) and the other is about the FEELINGS “calm” (line 1), “tranquil” (line 5), “sweet” (line 6), “sadness” (line 14), “misery” (line 18), “faith” (line 21), “melancholy” (line 25), “confused” (line 36) and “ignorant” (line 37).

 

3.4.4. RHYTHM AND RHYME

 

For me, this poem is unrhymed because there is not a clear rhythm in it. Matthew Arnold wrote it with a free rhyme.

 

4. PERSONAL INTERPRETATION

 

The poem is a melancholic poem and Arnold represents this feeling essentially through the sea. Apart from this, the use of adjectives like “tremulous cadence” in the line 13 and “eternal note of sadness” contribute to this melancholic feeling. He also shows the sadness with some sounds, such as, “the grating roar /of pebbles, which the waves draw back, and fling/ at their return, up the high strand" in lines 9 to 11.

 

The sea also represents the ideas that go away and come back like the movement of the sea waves. It can happen that the people who are always thinking of something, one day far no clear reason change their opinion and think something else. At that moment, faith is gone and for people without faith, there is no sense in living more. He is all the time showing us the human misery. Faith kept the world in calm but, at that moment, the faith was disappearing and leaving a lot of confusion among the people.

 

Orthodox Christianity was intellectually inadmissible to Arnold. Throughout the poem, the sea is used as an image and a metaphor. In the third stanza, as we can observe, the sea is turned into the “Sea of Faith”, which is a metaphor for a time when religion could exist without the doubts brought by progress and science of the modern period.

(cf. http://www.victorianweb.org/books/alienvision/arnold/1.html#religion)

 

At this time, the faith with God disappears and there is a general disillusionment with the world. The repetition of “neither…nor” in the 4th stanza enumerates all the basic human values: love, joy, light, certitude, peace, help for pain, etc. With these verses the author wants to underline that without them we couldn’t live. In the 3rd line appears a verse that says “the light/ gleams and is gone”. It means that, with the changes that brings the modern period, the light disappears and all is dark and with the light of the previous period, the faith leaves too.

 

On the other hand, I would like to add that in line 29, the author asks his love to be true and although Matthew Arnold could be referring to his honeymoon in Dover, as George Landow says, with it he is saying that the world hasn’t got any human values and he is addressing humanity in line 35 with the word “we”.

(cf. http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/touche4.html)

 

From my point of view, he also wants, by writing this poem, to make humanity to understand that they need these human values in order to live.

 

 

5. CONCLUSION

 

In order to sum up, I have to say that Arnold with the Dover Beach poem wanted to express the humanity’s general disappointment with the world because it was a time when the people had a lot of doubts brought through Darwinism, the Industrial Revolution, Imperialism, a crisis in religion, etc. and humanity’s faith was gone.

This poem and other poems that were written at this period show the enormous impact that progress made in the people who were used to the previous life.

 

Finally, I have to add that I have chosen this author in order to do my paper because it is said that he was a sort of crossing between Romanticism and the Modern era, although he wasn’t the most important one. I have said that some consider Arnold to be the bridge between Romanticism and Modernism. He uses the typical landscapes of the romantics and some similar themes like failure of religion as the science progress. He also uses the way of escape of the romantic poets but he tries to rationalize his impulses because while the life of imagination was more real to the romantics, he prefers the material world.

(cf. http://www.victorianweb.org/books/alienvision/arnold/1.html#religion)

(cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Arnold)

 

 

6. BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

 

 

-         http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/touche4.html

Home: <www.victorianweb.org>  10/02/07)

 

-         http://www.victorianweb.org/books/alienvision/arnold/1.html#religion

Home: <www.victorianweb.org>  10/02/07)

 

-         http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/touche2.html

Home: <www.victorianweb.org>  10/02/07)

 

-         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Arnold

Home: <www.wikipedia.org>  10/02/07)

 

-         http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/writings/doverbeach.html

Home: <www.victorianweb.org>  10/02/07)