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Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach"

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Re-Reading Questions

Text on p. 893 of the full Ninth Edition

Pay particular attention to italicized words, considering their literal and emotional meanings:





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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.

Re-Reading Questions

1. Read the poem aloud to yourself, then listen to this recording (requires RealPlayer). What different emphases and tones do you pick up in the recording? How do they affect the meaning of the poem?

2. There are many allusions in this poem which might help your re-reading. The famed chalk cliffs of Dover Beach, which look across the channel to France, are composed of massive and ancient layers of limestone (from sea coral). Sophocles, who lived on the Aegean Sea in Greece, authored many tragedies, such as Antigone. In an earlier sonnet, "To a Friend," Arnold praises Sophocles as one "Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole." The "Sea of Faith" probably refers to the unquestioned faith of medieval times. "Girdle" denotes a belt or sash worn around the waist, and is a word associated with medieval or Renaissance times. The final line is thought to refer to Thucydides' account of the vicious night battle of Epipolae, during which it was too dark to distinguish friend from foe.

3. Consider the following possibilities for a closer reading:

Trace the images of sight and sound and of light and dark and their different effects and meanings in the poem.

Study the patterns of the meter, rhyme, and line length of the poem, looking for ways in which the variations of sound reflect the meanings of the words.

Consider the complex metaphor of the tides here and how the speaker dwells primarily on the ebb tide. What does that seem to say to him about his world?

At what points is the "reality" pictured here a subjective projection of the speaker and his own anguish? What seems to cause his melancholy? Does he find hope?

 

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