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'''Dover Beach''' (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

Arnold's thoughts on the analysis of poetry

Analysis of the poem

Date of composition

References to "Dover Beach"

Notes

References

External links

Arnold's thoughts on the analysis of poetry

Matthew Arnold himself gives authority with respect to analysis; and so, as he sought to obtain as inspiration for his poetic renderings the muse of which he offers admiration, it is here appropriate to quote it, to provide the stimulus for viewing this poem as a whole piece:
“The date of an action, then, signifies nothing: the action itself, its selection and construction, this is what is all-important. This the Greeks understood far more clearly than we do. The radical difference between their poetical theory and ours consists, as it appears to me, in this: that, with them, the poetical character of the action in itself, and the conduct of it, was the first consideration; with us, attention is fixed mainly on the value of the separate thoughts and images which occur in the treatment of an action. They regarded the whole; we regard the parts. With them, the action predominated over the expression of it; with us, the expression predominates over the action. Not that they failed in expression, or were inattentive to it; on the contrary, they are the highest models of expression, the unapproached masters of the ‘grand style’: but their expression is so excellent because it is so admirably kept in its right degree of prominence; because it is so simple and so well subordinated; because it draws its force directly from the pregnancy of the matter which it conveys. For what reason was the Greek tragic poet confined to so limited a range of subjects? Because there are so few actions which unite in themselves, in the highest degree, the conditions of excellence; and it was not thought that on any but an excellent subject could an excellent poem be constructed…
“…We have poems which seem to exist merely for the sake of single lines and passages; not for the sake of producing any total-impression. We have critics who seem to direct their attention merely to detached expressions, to the language about the action, not to the action itself. I verily think that the majority of them do not in their hearts believe that there is such a thing as a total-impression to be derived from a poem at all, or to be demanded from a poet; they think the term a commonplace of metaphysical criticism. They will permit the poet to select any action he pleases, and to suffer that action to go as it will, provided he gratifies them with occasional bursts of fine writing, and with a shower of isolated thoughts and images. That is, they permit him to leave their poetical sense ungratified, provided that he gratifies their rhetorical sense and their curiosity. Of his neglecting to gratify these, there is little danger; he needs rather to be warned against the danger of attempting to gratify these alone; he needs rather to be perpetually reminded to prefer his action to everything else; so to treat this, as to permit its inherent excellences to develop themselves, without interruption from the intrusion of his personal peculiarities: most fortunate when he most entirely succeeds in effacing himself, and in enabling a noble action to subsist as it did in nature.
“But the modern critic not only permits a false practice: he absolutely prescribes false aims. ‘A true allegory of the state of one's own mind in a representative history,’ the poet is told, ‘is perhaps the highest thing that one can attempt in the way of poetry.’ And accordingly he attempts it. An allegory of the state of one's own mind, the highest problem of an art which imitates actions! No assuredly, it is not, it never can be so: no great poetical work has ever been produced with such an aim.” ^[2]

Analysis of the poem

"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." ^[3] 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."^[4] 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 favorite Greek dramatist." Allot goes on, however, to point out that "no passage in the plays [of Sophocles] is strictly applicable" to the passage in "Dover Beach". ^[6] 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."^[7] 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. ^[8]
:::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 "the most deeply felt seventeen lines ever written by a modern English poet." ^[9] 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." ^[3]
:::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 "descriptive of armies engaged in dubious conflict by night, was probably inspired by the well-known 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."^[11] Honan notes that John Henry Newman had used the image once "when he defined controversy as a sort of 'night battle'" and the image also occurs in Arthur Hugh Clough's ''The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich''.^[9] 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 under his father Dr. Arnold.^[11]
"The poems discourse," Honan tells us, "shifts literally and symbolically from the present, to Sophocles on the Aegean, from Medeieval 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 poems 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."^[9]

Date of 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."^[15] Allott concludes that the notes are probably from around 1849-50.^[16] "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. ^[17]
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."^[18]
:::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." ^[4]

References to "Dover Beach"

★ Anthony Hecht, US Poet Laureate 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".

★ 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 part of "Dover Beach" to his wife Mildred and her friends. One of Mildred's friends is driven to tears by the poem's imagery (presumably in leiu of the approaching global nuclear war), which leads another to hurl aspersions at Montag and denounce the very idea of poetry. Montag has cought a glimpse of the profound insecurity lurking beneath the surface of his banal and hedonistic society.

★ "Dover Beach" plays a role in the novel ''Saturday'' by Ian McEwan.

★ "Dover Beach" is quoted in the novel ''The Last Gentleman'' by Walker Percy.

★ "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 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."

★ 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"

★ ''Nora's Lost'', a short drama by Alan Haehnel, contains many references to "Dover Beach", and it quotes many of its lines. The characters actively discuss the poem as well as "On the Beach at Night Alone" by Walt Whitman.

★ Clash by Night is the name of a play by Clifford Odets, later made into a film noir by Fritz Lang.

★ 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.

★ Neil Peart quotes a line from the poem's final stanza in his lyrics to the Rush song "Armor and Sword", from the album ''Snakes and Arrows''.

★ Daljit Nagra's prize-winning poem "Look We Have Coming to Dover!" quotes the line, "So various, so beautiful, so new" as its epigraph.

Notes

1. Where Is Our Dover Beach?
2. Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, New York, 1913, ed. by William S. Johnson, Chap. I, “Theories of Literature and Criticism: Poetry and Classics”, pp. 9-10, 13
3. Honan, 1981, pg. 234.
4. Allott, 1965, pg. 240.
5. Allott, 1965, pg. 240.
6. Allott, 1965, pg. 241.
7. Tinker and Lowry, 1965, pg. 176-178.
8. Allott, 1965, pg. 241. For probable date of composition of "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse", see page 285.
9. Honan, 1981, pg. 235.
10. Honan, 1981, pg. 234.
11. Tinker and Lowry, 1965, pg. 175.
12. Honan, 1981, pg. 235.
13. Tinker and Lowry, 1965, pg. 175.
14. Honan, 1981, pg. 235.
15. Tinker and Lowry, 1940, pg. 173.
16. Allott, 1965, pg. 239.
17. Allott, 1965, pg. 147.
18. Tinker and Lowry, 1940, pg. 174-5.
19. Allott, 1965, pg. 240.

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

External links

★ Text of the poem