Essay: Where Is Our Dover Beach?

Essay: Where Is Our Dover Beach? Poem of the week: Dover Beach Waves crash onto a beach Waves crash onto a beach. Photograph: Graham Turner View more sharing options Shares 90 Comments 114 Carol Rumens Monday 20 October 2008 16.05 BST First published on Monday 20 October 2008 16.05 BST Dover Beach is a 'honeymoon' poem. Written in 1851, shortly after Matthew Arnold's marriage to Frances Lucy Wightman, it evokes quite literally the "sweetness and light" which Arnold famously found in the classical world, in whose image he formed his ideals of English culture. In fact, those public values are privatised in the very word the poem conjures for us: honeymoon. Dover Beach fundamentally seems to be about a withdrawal into personal values. Historical pessimism moves in swiftly as a tide. Arnold's description of the noise of the waves is superbly accurate. Even when he ventures into Miltonic (and Greek) mode, with that "tremulous cadence slow," he maintains a certain realism. "Tremulous" may be emotive, but it also brilliantly evokes the soft rattling of the millions of pebbles and grits as the waves redistribute them. Sign up for the Bookmarks email Read more Arnold's classical learning is unpretentiously apparent. The verse-movement, with its fluid alternation of three, four and five-beat lines, suggests the rhythmic flexibility of Greek choral poetry. Stanza two, with its reference to Sophocles, brings home a sense of tragic fatedness. The following lines from Antigone may be relevant: "Blest are they whose days have not tasted of evil. For when a house hath once been shaken from heaven, there the curse fails nevermore, passing from life to life of the race; even as, when the surge is driven over the darkness of the deep by the fierce breath of Thracian sea-winds, it rolls up the black sands front the depths, and there is sullen roar from wind-vexed headlands that from the blows of the storm." While Sophocles can invoke the Greek ideal of the 'thinking Warrior', Arnold sees order and sanity destroyed in the antithesis of "ignorant armies". Religion ("The Sea of Faith") might have once provided protection to the Christian world, but is now feared to be in recession. Though, for the ancient Greeks, Desire "sits enthroned among the mighty laws", romantic love has no supreme virtue. Arnold, on the other hand, seems to suggest that the lovers' vow is the only value left with which to counter history. The speaker realises that, out there in the world, there is "neither joy, nor love, nor light…". The two newlyweds, standing at the window looking across the moonlit sea, have become, in a sense, the whole of love. It's quite a jolt to contrast the modernity of this view with the poem's actual date. Arnold was not wholly comfortable with the idea of himself as a poet. He wrote: "... It is not so light a matter, when you have other grave claims on your powers, to submit voluntarily to the exhaustion of the best poetical production in a time like this ... It is only in the best poetical epochs ... that you can descend into yourself and produce the best of your thought and feeling naturally, and without an overwhelming and to some degree morbid effort." In Dover Beach, the poet in Arnold has insisted that the descent be made, however painful. His most anthologised poem is, formally, his most radical. If he had written more in this vein, he would have been canonised as a great poet. Instead, until relatively recently, he was regarded as a great thinker. Works like Culture and Anarchy have been an enormous influence on twentieth-century literary criticism. Perhaps they deserve to be revisited. Of course, the idea of culture Arnold presents would be utterly alien to us now – but have we better replacements? Creative Britain, perhaps, instead of classical "sweetness and light"? Progress indeed. Dover Beach 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 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 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).