Tom Snyder
Prof. Brookmeyer
Third Paper: Poetry
January 19, 2000
Great works of poetry convey a feeling, mood, or message that affects the reader on an emotional, personal level. Great works of poetry can do that -- translate a literal story/theme -- but masterpieces, like Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," are a double-edged sword, containing a second, figurative theme -- a message between the lines and underneath the obvious. Not only is Matthew Arnold's 1867 poem, "Dover Beach," a unique and beautiful literary work describing a lover's longing for trust and faith, but on a figurative plain it also stands as a metaphor for that constant evil called war.
Literally, "Dover Beach" flows through four irregularly rhymed sections that increase in emotional impact and describe a lover's need for faithfulness in an otherwise dark and unfaithful world. In this traditional sense, the narrator of "Dover Beach" is either a man or woman standing at a window wearily reflecting on the world while staring at the beauty of the night coast. In the first section (Arnold's poem is very prose-like in its lack of a distinct structure or rhyme scheme, sputtering through the first nine lines in an abacdbdce rhyme scheme), the lover declares that "The sea is calm tonight." The poem continues with simple imagery of the atmosphere, describing the full tide, the moon, the beaches of Dover, the night air, the waves, all of which we presume are viewable from the narrator's window. The scene is cemented: a moon-bathed beach, the waves drawing back, only to crash back in a "grating roar of pebbles." "The eternal note of sadness" is set as the lover begins to question the beauty he sees and the love he longs to keep.
The next two sections of "Dover Beach" describe a world of "human misery" and a "Sea of Faith" long gone. The speaker sounds desperate, worn and torn by the world in which he lives, and with the final nine lines of the poem, begs his lover to be faithful; to remain true to their fragile love which is all that is left for them in a world "Where ignorant armies clash by night." On this literal plain, the poem utilizes simple, yet clear and strong diction to convey a theme of sadness amongst diminishing hope for love in an evil world where brother slays brother in wars both "civil" and "other." This is depressing and powerful, but not as nearly as hurting and epic as the figurative reading of "Dover Beach."
On a figurative level, "Dover Beach" represents much more than a lover's prayer for faithfulness. Metaphorically, Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" is profoundly anti-war and philosophical in its attempt to link war with nature. In this view, it does not matter where the narrator or speaker stands during his reflections. This voice comes from a philosopher, much like "Sophocles long ago," who stands not in a particular place, but a state of mind. The window is not a wooden frame of glass, but rather a window into the past, seeing the constant force that war has been. Declaring: "Listen! You hear the grating roar/ Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling," the waves can be perceived as a metaphor for the bloody and destructive act of war, that powerful force that treats men as pebbles, flinging and crashing them against the rocks of the world. "Begin, and cease, and then again begin,/ With tremulous cadence slow, and bring/ The eternal note of sadness in." With that line Arnold describes war as an eternal force, never ending, merely slowing and drawing back for intervals of time to build in force and come roaring back.
In "Dover Beach," war is a "turbid ebb and flow of human misery," that has drained the "Sea of Faith" that "Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore/ Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled." The "sea" is the world in which the narrator can now "only hear/ Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar." War -- that wave -- is described not as a creation of man, but rather a force of nature that runs like clockwork. In the final nine-line section the speaker dreams of joy, love, and light in a world that appears "To lie before us like a land of dreams," but understands the reality of the world in which he is trapped. He concludes that the world "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." Whether Arnold intends to imply that these things were murdered and driven from the world by war or that they never even existed in the first place is left to the readers to decide for themselves.
On a traditional, literal level, Matthew Arnold's poem, "Dover Beach," is a vivid voice praying for faithful love in a beautiful yet evil and faithless world, but figuratively, the poem is a metaphor for the cycle of war and the darkness it brings to the world. The waves represent the battles, the pebbles the innocent people flung about by their power, and that note of despair present throughout the entire poem hints at no possible end for weary romantics like the poem's narrator. Crying both for the endurance of love and an end to war at the same time, "Dover Beach" stands as a poetic masterpiece of one eternal note: sadness.