MATTHEW ARNOLD (Dover Beach)

Introduction

In order to see the Romantic influence in the poets of the Victorian Age, I’ll make the analysis of a poem by Matthew Arnold, sometimes called the third great Victorian poet, after Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning.

I have chosen one of his major poems, called Dover Beach, written in 1867, which is usually held up as one of the first examples of modern sensibility. We’ll see through the analysis of the structure and themes of this poem the main characteristics both from Romantic and Victorian poetry.

Poetical Background

Matthew Arnold was born in England in 1822. He wrote most of his best-known poetry before the age of forty, after which he turned to literary and cultural criticism and theology. He was keenly aware of his place in poetry dealing with the poets of his time, and in an 1869 letter to his mother, discussed the merits of his work and his two more famous peers: "My poems represent, on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary productions which reflect it. It might be fairly urged that I have less poetic sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning. Yet because I have more perhaps of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn, as they have had theirs."

Referring to the Romantic poetry, in a famous preface to a selection of the poems of William Wordsworth, Arnold identified himself, a little ironically, as a "Wordsworthian." The influence of Wordsworth, both in ideas and in diction, is unmistakable in Arnold's best poetry.[1]

Analysis

DOVER BEACH[2]

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.

 

This poem is constituted by four stanzas which have a variable number of verses and which don’t follow any kind of rhyme.

The first stanza opens with a description of the sea between France and England at night. He makes a harmonious description of the idyllic scene, a sign of Romantic contemplation of nature. He then calls the reader to the window to share the beautiful scene and to hear the sound of the waves breaking with the rocks, this way he wants to involve him in the poem, also noticed by the use of imperatives. The sense of repetition is present as the waves return again and again to the shore. Arnold identifies this scene with the feeling of sadness. The expression of emotions is another important feature in romantics in contrast with the Enlightenment period in which the emotions were forgotten to give way to rationality.

In the second stanza, he goes back to the past and compares his feeling with the feeling that Sophocles once heard on the Agaean Sea. Although the distance existing between them in time and place, their feelings contemplating the same scenery are still the same. The northern sea in this stanza makes reference to the sea described in the first stanza. He is making a comparison between the sea and the human misery, that comparison that once Sophocles also did.

The third stanza constitutes a metaphor relating to religion and calls it “the Sea of Faith”. Before the Darwinist ideas made up in the Victorian Age, doubts about religion didn’t exist, the world was dressed “like the folds of a bright girdle furled”. Now, that the world has no more faith, it is naked. He goes from a feeling of hope in the first lines of this stanza to a pessimistic vision of his contemporary age.

In the fourth stanza, he appeals to love to be true, that means, to the faith the world needs. The lost of values of religion had left humankind in darkness. With this multiple negation “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain/” he means that if nothing of this exists what else can remain? They have all kind of new ideas “a land of dreams,/ So various, so beautiful, so new/” that represent the beautiful scene of the seaside, but they have lost the peace and the light of religion, which is represented by the turning of the scene in a “darkling plain” where struggles of confused ignorants can be heard.

The whole poem is based in melancholy. He uses vocatives continually to appeal to his contemporary society to realize about the problem of faith. He uses also lots of adjectives to emphasize his feelings and express himself in a better way.

Conclusion

As we have seen in the analysis of the poem, the Romantic influence is highly present. Basically the description of nature and the expression of the own feeling towards it are the main aspects relating to Romanticism in this work. There is also a melancholy of past referring both to the nearly time before the Victorian age and the long past of Greek philosophers.

I have also found in Dover Beach a Wordsworth’s influence from his poem Tintern Abbey, where he relates continually to the past and describes a nature scene where the sound of waters can also be heard.

Bibliography

 

 

 

 

Academic year 2006/2007
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Sandra Gisbert Sánchez
sangis@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press

 

 


[1] From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Arnold#Writings:_Poetry_and_Prose

[2] From http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/writings/doverbeach.html