Dover Beach Matthew Arnold

An Introduction to Dover Beach

Dover Beach was published in 1867 in new poems. The scene described in the poem is the English Channel at Dover, with the chalk-cliffs looking bright in the soft moonlight. The ‘love’ addressee in the poem is Arnold’s newly married wife Frances Lucy Wightman with whom he visited Dover.

A critical appreciation of Dover Beach

Dover Beach is pervaded by melancholy. Arnold realizes that nature, supposed to boost dispirited man, has only a depressing effect on him. There is light everywhere on Dover Beach. The English Channel is glistening in the moonlight. The French coast at a distance is gleaming. The chalk-cliffs of England are ‘glimmering’. The bay is ‘tranquil’. The land is ‘moon blanched’ the ways ‘spray the shore’. In spite of all these beautiful natural scenes the poet is not happy. The waves rising and falling reminds the poet only on the rise and fall of human misery. The harsh sound of pebbles rolled on the shore by the ways seems to the poet to strike only a note of sadness.

Arnold feels that sadness is eternal. The waves of the English Channel fill the poet only with gloom. In the same way the waves of the Mediterranean Sea might have only saddened the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles, thinking of man being assailed by endless waves of suffering.

Having said that sadness is ‘eternal’, Arnold contradicts himself by saying that the Sea of Faith was once full. Arnold uses only the vague pointer ‘once’. He does not, and probably cannot, state specifically when the sea of faith was full. It could not have been full during the time of Sophocles. If Sophocles had been sustained by faith, he would not have viewed man as being the plaything of blind forces. Even if we admit that the Sea of Faith was once full, we cannot escape the conclusion that the present state is dreary. Religious faith had retreated, leaving behind the shingles of materialism and utilitarianism.

Arnold is now quite aware of the unpleasantness and emptiness of life, particularly his life. Nature cannot inspire him – the beautiful scenes around the English Channel only depress him. Literature, too fails him. Sophocles works reflect not the glory of life but merely “the turbid ebb and flow of human misery”. Thanks to the advancement of science, Christianity too has’ retreated’. In the place of the lie-giving waters of religion, there are only the barren rocks of materialism and nihilism.

The major sources of inner nourishment have been depleted. Arnold falls back on love, the Victorian equivalent of the Freudian concept of sexual fulfilment as the centre of life. Arnold was always aware of the revivifying power of love. In The Buried Life, for instance, he speaks of how love can revitalize and rejuvenate us

“When a beloved hand is laid in ours,

When jaded with the rust and glare

Of the interminable hours,

Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,

When our world – deafen’d ear

Is by the tones of a loved voice caress’d-

A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,

                        And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.

This idea is repeated in Dover Beach. Arnold sadly reflects that all the varied attractions of life are empty and can give neither joy not peace if there is no love. Life without love takes a destructive turn, with people struggling and harming one another, like soldiers fighting in the dark and killing not enemies but men of their own side, out of ignorance. The poem begins with a lovely description of “moon-balanced land” and closed with the horrifying visions of “darkling plain’ and self-destructive massacre.

The poem revolves round the image of the sea. After describing the English Channel and the Aegean Sea literally, the poet goes on to describe the Sea of Faith. The link between the literal and the symbolic seas is that in both the seas and waves are retiring, leaving behind, and pebbles. Taken symbolically, the pebbles stand for lifeless materialism. Religious faith is also glorified by a jewel image, faith being compared to a ‘bright girdle’ enclosing the earth. In the last stanza, life without love and spiritual illumination (certitude) is viewed as fighting “on a darkling plain” and killing comrades by mistake.