Arnold's Dover Beach - Research Paper Example

December 7, Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach The famous and representative poem of Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach, is most often read as a pessimistic and disgruntled meditation on life, religion and humanity. In fact, the poem is very complex in terms of layers of meaning and somewhat equivocal. The most common reading of Dover Beach assumes the poem expresses Arnold’s discontent with the nineteenth century world and its materialistic disposition. While this reading is very pertinent, the poem requires further, more in-depth analysis. Thus, the disconsolate and ironic tone of the poem comes not only from the author’s discontent with materialism and with the decline of spirituality but also from the confusion triggered by an era of transition. In the context of the Victorian Age, an age of transition between Romanticism and Modernism, Dover Beach reflects the poet’s uncertainty as he gropes for meaning in an ever-changing world. As many critics have noted, Arnold’s Dover Beach is, in many ways, an obvious revision of romantic poems, with pessimistic overtones. The poem makes references and allusions to the past, present and future, as well as to history, religion and humanity. It is therefore incoherent and equivocal to a certain extent. This, however, is not inadvertent: it is Arnold’s way of expressing his confusion in front of a world that is changing before his eyes. The text is divided in sections, which are seemingly unified by the seascape imagery and visuals. Interestingly, the poem opens with soothing images of a calm sea and its surroundings by night. The sea is “calm”, the moon “lies fair”, the light “gleams”, the cliffs are “glimmering” and the bay is “tranquil” (Arnold 86). The scenery described here seems to be oozing peace and calm. Everything is contoured softly, with no sharp lines. Moreover, the air is “sweet” and the seascape so inviting that the poet calls an unknown addressee to the window to partake of the beauty of nature. Yet, for some reason, the author instantly discards all this and isolates a single sensory experience, the “grating roar/ Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling/ At their return, up the high strand…”(Arnold 86). It becomes thus obvious that Arnold does not find refuge in nature and does not look for inspiration in its beauties, as a Romantic poet would have. Instead, he focuses on the sound of waves which, to him, obviously bears portentous meaning. The grating sound made by the pebbles as they are carried to and forth on the beach is, in the poet’s view, an “eternal note of sadness” (Arnold 86). Arnold projects his own state of mind and thoughts on the world and to him nature speaks of materialism and the absence of the spiritual. Instead of feeding his imagination, nature leaves the poet baffled and dejected. The Victorians disenchantment with nature was determined by the unprecedented progress of science, which depleted the world of much of its mystery. According to Patrick J. Creevy, the tidal metaphor serves here to show that man is merely a toy in the hands of nature and forces he cannot fight: “The universal sadness is that all men are drawn and flung eternally in a fatal to and fro, swept up always and everywhere by uncontrollable forces” (Creevy 14). Arnold does not feel elation in front of the beauty of nature but rather despair at its impersonality and indifference to man. The next sequence of the poem expounds the tidal metaphor further. Arnold recalls here Sophocles, who, like himself, compared the restless motion of the waves with human misery: “[Sophocles] Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought/ Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow/ Of human misery” (Arnold 86). This brief, passing allusion to Sophocles is actually of great importance in the economy of the poem. Retrieving Sophocles’ philosophical views from the depths of history, Arnold finds a confirmation for his pessimistic and gloomy thoughts. For the renowned tragedian, human life was nothing but an uninterrupted array of defeats and agony: “The Sophocles of Dover Beach is a pessimist avant la lettre, seemingly ready to render as a judgment valid for all times places that… life, at least human life, is necessarily suffering” (Grob 175). From the present materialism of the nineteenth century, Arnold takes a leap to the ancient Greece, where man was seen as a toy in the hands of destiny. The author’s speculative jumps from one idea to another and one era to a different one are indicative of a state of uncertainty and confusion, where he searches for meanings. Further in the poem, the metaphor of tide is associated with yet another reason for despair: the anxiety over the loss of faith in the modern age. As Davis notes, Dover Beach voices here a crucial dilemma for the Victorian era, that of the disappearance of God from the world (Davis 398). Again, the visual construction of the metaphor is very significant: the poet imagines here a “Sea of Faith” that ebbs without flowing back: “Now I only hear/ Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar…” (Arnold 86). The image of humanity, diminutive and impotent, as “the naked shingles” from which the sea of faith has retreated, captures the state of extreme desolation the world. The sound is equally powerful since it infuses the already disturbing image with more somberness. The roar of the waves which are retreating hints of an almost savage world and the sound of the night-wind blowing enhances the utter feeling of void. For Arnold, the world is a like a hollow shell, where only the material is prominent. The feeling of emptiness is overwhelming and contrasts greatly with the image of the past where the sea of faith enfolded the earth as a “bright girdle”. The image of the girdle further emphasizes the protective and comforting role of faith in the past, which is no longer felt in the present. Moreover, the fact that only the ebb is present and the waves don’t flow back seems to imply that the situation is permanent and therefore casts similar gloom on the future. Although the poet uses the seascape visuals and sounds to the full as a base for his metaphorical constructions, it becomes apparent that, somehow, he struggles with language and meaning throughout the poem. Lauren Caldwell emphasizes this bewildering aspect of Arnold’s poetry, which makes him, to a certain degree a precursor of modernism. As Caldwell observes, this fact is obvious at the end of the poem where, while the gloomy and ironic tone persists, the metaphor of the ebbing sea disappears completely: ““All metaphorical avenues are cut off. Looking to the past only reminds us how alone we are in the present… Arnold has already realized the impossibility of translating thoughts or sensations truly into the language of equivalence” (Caldwell 436). As Caldwell points out, the tidal metaphor implies a very keen sense of erosion that pervades the poem and Arnold’s perception of the world: “Dover Beach is the enactment of a poet groping his way through a physically and linguistically eroded world…” (Caldwell 430). His almost obsessive preoccupation with erosion and degradation brings him closer to the modern view of world than most of the Victorian writers. After having discoursed and lamented himself on the pitiable state of the world, the poet seems to have an even keener sense of solitude and turns again to the silent other that he had approached at the beginning of the poem. The meaning of few words he addresses to the unknown person, “Ah, love, let us be true/ To one another!” is disputed by the critics. While some view it as a proof of love and as the poet’s only hint at stability and certitude, others see it merely as desperate cry. The second interpretation seems more valid in the light of what follows immediately after, namely the final and most pessimistic depiction of the state of the world as irremediably hopeless: …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 (Arnold 86). These lines are extremely eloquent for the poet’s complete and utter pessimism. He even refutes the apparently positive aspects of the world, its beauty, novelty and variety, contending that these are only illusions and that, in reality, there is nothing one can cling to. Along with joy and light, love is included in the enumeration as well, making it hard to read the poem as a declaration of love. Not only is the world similar to a vast desert, equally empty and illusory, but consolation cannot be found by relating to the others either. If love and joy are also absent, the universe is indeed barren. As the poem closes, the poet reverts to different imagery altogether. Instead of the metaphors drawn from nature, he uses here the image of a desolate plain where armies blindly clash against each other by night. Nils Clausson remarks on Arnold’s inability to return to nature, where he would find no consolation, in the last sequence of the poem: Unlike the Romantics, instead of ultimately returning to the world, moving outward again beyond the self to a feeling of resolution and harmony with nature, Arnold is compelled to abandon nature altogether and describe his intuition through a discordant image drawn from human battle (Clausson 279). Here it becomes all the more clear that not only is the relationship between man and nature highly discordant, but the one among people equally disappointing. The reference to war can only be read as a further exemplification of the complete disarray of the world and the futility of human action. If life is nothing but a blind struggle for survival and against others then there is no gleam of hope for man. Thus, Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach is the expression of the poet’s pessimistic and negativist thoughts on the world. Arnold regarded permanent change and transition as the reason for unsteadiness and unhappiness. What is notable is that Dover Beach is not simply the voicing of discontent with the world and humanity, but also desperate search for meaning, reflected in the many allusions and references in the text. A harbinger of modernism, the poet prefigured the impossibility of finding meaning in a world governed by uncertainty and natural events, which can never be controlled by human will. Works Cited: Arnold, Matthew. Dover Beach and Other Poems. Toronto: Dover Publications, 1994. Caldwell, Lauren. Truncating Coleridgean Conversation and the Re-visioning of "Dover Beach". Victorian Poetry, Vol. 45, 2007. Clausson, Nils. Arnolds Coleridgean Conversation Poem: "Dover Beach" and "The Eolian Harp". Papers on Language & Literature, Vol. 44, 2008. Creevy, Patrick J. Arnolds Dover Beach. The Explicator, Vol. 36, 1978. Davis, William V. The Tides Pendulum Truth: A Reading of the Poetry of Theological Crisis from Matthew Arnold to R. S. Thomas. Christianity and Literature. Volume: 55. Issue: 3, 2006. Grob, Alan. A Longing Like Despair: Arnold’s Poetry of Pessimism. Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 2002. Read More