Dover Beach
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"Dover Beach" is the most famous poem by Matthew Arnold and is generally considered one of the most important poems of the 19th century. First published in 1867, in the collection, New Poems, its condensed 37 lines with a subtly interwoven and shifting rhyme have a memorable theme: the crisis of faith in the mid-Victorian world, which was generated by the German developments of biblical Higher Criticism.
In the first six lines, Arnold evokes the moonlit seascape of the English Channel, tranquil and sweet, and the reassuring "cliffs of England" of the Strait of Dover. "Only," opening the seventh line, begins the transition, unfolding through the "tremulous cadence" of the waves to the "eternal note of sadness." The Anglo-Grecian connections of Sophocles and the Aegean are only momentarily relevant "by this distant northern sea," for this is the Sea of Faith — or was, and that image withdraws in its turn and the vision turns windy, vast, naked and drear. "Ah love..." here the accumulated poetry conveys the momentary view that love is the bulwark against the uncertainties of the modern (Victorian) world — the solution the Victorian reader expected — "only" Arnold then undercuts this declaration with a despairing litany of the failure of culture, to end with the prophetic imagery of the last three lines.
[edit] References to "Dover Beach"
- Anthony Hecht, US Poet Laureate from 1982 to 1984, offered a reply in "The Dover Bitch", where the subject of Arnold's adoration resists the notion of being used as a "cosmic last resort". However, the speaker in "Dover Beach" is of unknown gender, and a common practice among Victorian poets was to write dramatic monologues from the perspective of someone else (e.g., Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi").
- Samuel Barber composed a setting of "Dover Beach" for string quartet and baritone.
- In the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, author Ray Bradbury has his protagonist Guy Montag read "Dover Beach" to his wife Mildred and her friends. Although the poem is lost on Mildred and company, Montag glimpses the banality of their hedonistic society.
- "Dover Beach" plays a role in the novel Saturday by Ian McEwan.
- "Dover Beach" plays a subtle role in the poem "Moon" by Billy Collins.
- Kevin Kline's character, Cal Gold, in the film The Anniversary Party recites part of "Dover Beach" as a toast.
- Philip Reeve's novel A Darkling Plain (final book in the Hungry City Chronicles quartet) is titled after a line in "Dover Beach", and has the last stanza of the poem as an introduction.
- The line "as on a darkling plain" is the title of a science fiction novel by Ben Bova in reference to a lunar plain covered with strange unexplained artifacts.
- Justice William Rehnquist, in his concurring opinion in Northern Pipeline Constr. Co. v. Marathon Pipeline Co., 458 U.S. 50 (1982), compared judicial decisions regarding the power of Congress to create legislative courts to "landmarks on a judicial 'darkling plain' where ignorant armies have clashed by night."
- Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 features a subtle reference to "Dover Beach" in the chapter Havermyer: "the open-air movie theater in which， for the daily amusement of the dying， ignorant armies clashed by night on a collapsible screen"
