Dover Beach

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Dover Beach (published in 1867), is the most famous poem by Matthew Arnold and is generally considered one of the most important poems of the 19th century.^[1] It was first published in the collection New Poems.

Contents 1 Analysis 2 Composition 3 Influence 4 Notes 4.1 References 5 External links

[edit] Analysis

"Dover Beach," says Park Honan, "opens with images of confidence and beauty and profound security." Reflecting the traditional notion that the poem was written during Arnold's honeymoon (see Date of composition below), he goes on to say, "The speaker might be talking to his bride in a moonlit city near glimmering chalk cliffs." ^[2] Allott notes that "in ll. 1-6 much of the effectiveness of the descriptions depends on the high proportion of monosyllables and the simplicity of the key epithets 'calm', 'fair', 'tranquil'. In l.6 the window is approached and the sweetness of the air felt before the sound of the sea is first heard in the following lines."^[3] Allott also detects an echo of Senancour's Obermann in these opening lines.^[4]

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.

In the second section of the poem, Arnold invokes Sophocles (495 BC - 406 BC) who was, Allott tells us, "Arnold's favourite Greek dramatist." Allott goes on, however, to point out that "no passage in the plays [of Sophocles] is strictly applicable" to the passage in "Dover Beach". ^[5] Tinker and Lowry suggest passages from the plays Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Oedipus at Colonus, and Philoctetes. But they add that "the Greek author has reference only to the successive blows of Fate which fall upon a particular family which has been devoted to destruction by the gods. The plight described metaphorically by the English poet is conceived to have fallen upon the whole human race."^[6] Allott feels that the passage from the Trachiniae (The Women of Trachis) is closest. Also of note in this section, Arnold echoes the "distant northern shore" of line 20 in ll. 80-82 of his "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" which appears to have been written at about the same time. ^[7]

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.

Honan calls the final lines of the poem "the most deeply felt seventeen lines ever written by a modern English poet." ^[8] He also connects the "vast edges drear" to a possible memory of Wastwater in the Lake District, which Honan describes as "mountainous grey 'scree' running into translucent depths of water." ^[9]

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.

The "famous simile" in the final lines probably allude to a passage in Thucydides' account of the battle of Epipolae. "Here are to be found the details used by Arnold: a night-attack, fought upon a plain at the top of a cliff, in the moonlight, so that the soldiers could not distinguish clearly between friend and foe, with the resulting flight of certain Athenian troops, and various 'alarms,' watchwords, and battle-cries shouted aloud to the increasing confusion of all."^[10] Honan notes that John Henry Newman had used the image once to define controversy as a sort of 'night battle' and the image also occurs in Arthur Hugh Clough's The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich.^[11] Tinker and Lowry point out that "there is evidence that the passage about the 'night-battle' was familiar coin among Rugbeians" at the time Arnold attended Rugby and studied there under his father Dr. Thomas Arnold whose keen interest in Thucydides had a distinct impact on his students.^[12]

"The poem's discourse," Honan tells us, "shifts literally and symbolically from the present, to Sophocles on the Aegean, from Medieval Europe back to the present—and the auditory and visual images are dramatic and mimetic and didactic. Exploring the dark terror that lies beneath his happiness in love, the speaker resolves to love—and exegencies of history and the nexus between lovers are the poem's real issues. That lovers may be 'true/To one another' is a precarious notion: love in the modern city momentarily gives peace, but nothing else in a post-medieval society reflects or confirms the faithfulness of lovers. Devoid of love and light the world is a maze of confusion left by 'retreating' faith."^[13]

[edit] Composition

According to Tinker and Lowry, "a draft of the first twenty-eight lines of the poem" were written in pencil "on the back of a folded sheet of paper containing notes on the career of Empedocles."^[14] Allott concludes that the notes are probably from around 1849-50.^[15] "Empedocles on Etna," again according to Allott, was probably written 1849-52, the notes on Empedocles are likely to be contemporary with the writing of that poem. ^[16]

The final line of this draft is:

And naked shingles of the world. Ah love &c

Tinker and Lowry conclude that this "seem[s] to indicate that the last nine lines of the poem as we know it were already in existence when the portion regarding the ebb and flow of the sea at Dover was composed." This would make the manuscript "a prelude to the concluding paragraph" of the poem in which "there is no reference to the sea or tides."^[17]

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 from pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Arnold's visits to Dover may also provide some clue to the date of composition. Allott has Arnold in Dover in June 1851 and again in October of that year "on his return from his delayed continental honeymoon." To critics who conclude that ll. 1-28 were written at Dover and ll. 29-37 "were rescued from some discarded poem," Allott suggests the contrary, i.e. that the final lines "were written at Dover in late June," while " ll. 29-37 were written in London shortly afterwards." ^[18]

[edit] Influence

Anthony Hecht, US Poet Laureate, replied to "Dover Beach" in his poem "The Dover Bitch".

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl

With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,

And he said to her, "Try to be true to me,

And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad

All over, etc. etc."

The anonymous figure to whom Arnold addresses his poem becomes the subject of Hecht's poem. In Hecht's poem she "caught the bitter allusion to the sea", imagined "what his whiskers would feel like / On the back of her neck", and felt sad as she looked out across the channel. "And then she got really angry" at the thought that she had become "a sort of mournful cosmic last resort." After which she says "one or two unprintable things."

But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,

She's really all right. I still see her once in a while

And she always treats me right.^[19]

Kenneth and Miriam Allott, referring to "Dover Bitch" as "an irreverent jeu d'esprit," nonetheless see, particularly in the line "a sort of mournful cosmic last resort," an extension of the original's poem main theme.^[20]

"Dover Beach" has been mentioned in of a number of novels, plays, poems, and films. Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 alludes to the poem 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." In Fahrenheit 451, author Ray Bradbury has his protagonist Guy Montag read part of "Dover Beach" to his wife Mildred and her friends. Samuel Barber composed a setting of "Dover Beach" for string quartet and baritone. In Dodie Smith's novel, I Capture the Castle, the book's protagonist remarks that Debussy's Clair de Lune reminds her of "Dover Beach" (in the film adaptation of the novel, the character quotes (or, rather, misquotes) a line from the poem).

It is also mentioned in Saturday by Ian McEwan, The Last Gentleman by Walker Percy, A Song For Lya by George R.R. Martin, Rush song "Armour and Sword", from the album Snakes and Arrows (lyrics by Neil Peart), Nora's Lost, a short drama by Alan Haehnel, Daljit Nagra's prize-winning poem "Look We Have Coming to Dover!" which quotes the line, "So various, so beautiful, so new" as its epigraph, and 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. The poem has also provided a ready source for titles: On a Darkling Plain by Clifford Irving, A Darkling Plain by Philip Reeve, As On a Darkling Plain by Ben Bova (the title refers to a lunar plain covered with strange unexplained artifacts), Clash by Night, a play by Clifford Odets (later made into a film noir by Fritz Lang), and Norman Mailer's National Book Award winner The Armies of the Night about the 1967 March on the Pentagon.

Even in the U. S. Supreme Court the poem has had its influence: Justice William Rehnquist, in his concurring opinion in Northern Pipeline Co. v. Marathon Pipe Line 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."

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Professors Chauncey Brewster Tinker and Howard Foster Lowry, The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940) Alibris ID 8235403151

• Kenneth Allott (editor), The Poems of Matthew Arnold (London and New York: Longman Norton, 1965) ISBN 0393043770
• Park Honan, Matthew Arnold, a life (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1981) ISBN 0070296979

[edit] External links

• Text of the poem