Dover Beach
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“Dover Beach” is a melancholic poem. Matthew Arnold uses the means of pathetic fallacy, when he attributes or rather projects the human feeling of sadness onto an inanimate object like the sea. At the same time he creates a feeling of pathos. The reader can feel sympathy for the suffering lyrical self, who suffers under the existing conditions.
The repetition of “is” in lines 1-4 is used to illustrate the nightly seaside scenery:
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; . . . [emphasis mine]
It leads up to an eventual climax with the light/ gleams and is gone . The first two is portray what can be seen. The last is emphasises that the light is not there, that it cannot be seen any longer, but is gone and leaves nothing but darkness behind. In a metaphorical sense of the word, not only the light is gone, but also certainty. The darkness makes it hard to define both ones own and somebody elses position, and one can never be certain that the light will ever return.
A repetition of neithernor in stanza 4 underlines a series of denials: “. . . neither joy, nor love, nor light/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;” (l. 33-34) [emphasis mine]. All these are basic human values. If none of these do truly exist, this raises the question of what remains at all. With these lines, Arnold draws a very bleak and nihilistic view of the world he is living in.
As in “Calais Sands”, he uses a lot of adjectives to enrich the poems language, such as “tremulous cadence” (l.13) and “eternal note of sadness” (l.14). These help to increase the general melancholic feeling of the poem.
Exclamations are used at various points of the poem with quite opposite effects. In the first stanza, Arnold displays an outwardly beautiful nightly seaside scenery, when the lyrical self calls his love to the window (“Come . .. !” (l.6)) to share with him the serenity of the evening. First she is asked to pay attention to the visual, then to the aural impression (“Listen!” (l.9)).
In the fourth stanza, however, after he has related his general disillusionment with the world, he pledges for his love to be faithful (true) to him. (“Ah, love, let us be true/To one another! . . .” (l. 29-30))
A simile in stanza 3 (“like the folds of a bright girdle furled,” l. 13)) contrasts with “Vast edges drear/And naked shingles of the world.” (l. 27-28). Peter HДјhn calls this “Kleidervergleich” and explains:
Es tritt andeutungsweise noch ein weiteres Bild zur Meeresmetapher hinzu, der Kleidervergleich, der die Sinnentleerung als Prozess der EntblД¶ssung wiedergibt . . . Eine wichtige Implikation dieses Bildes ist die Vorstellung, dass der Sinn nicht den Dingen selbst innewohnt, sondern ihnen vom Menschen (seinem “Glauben”) erst Дјbergezogen wird.” [74]
Throughout the poem, the sea is used as an image and a metaphor. At first, it is beautiful to look at in the moonlight (ll.1-8), then it begins to make hostile sounds (“grating roar” (l. 9); “tremulous cadence” (l.13)) that evoke a general feeling of sadness. In the third stanza, the sea is turned into a metaphoric “Sea of Faith” (l.21) — a symbol for a time when religion could still be experienced without the doubts brought about by progress and science (Darwinism). Now, the Sea of Faith and thus the certainty of religion withdraws itself from the human grasp and leaves only darkness behind.
Theme and Subject
The first stanza opens with the description of a nightly scene at the seaside. The lyrical self calls his addressee to the window, to share the visual beauty of the scene. Then he calls her attention to the aural experience, which is somehow less beautiful. The lyrical self projects his own feelings of melancholy on to the sound of “the