Transcript Dover Beach - npillay5A2010

Matthew Arnold
 Matthew
Arnold (1822
– 1888) was
an English
poet and
critic who
wrote avidly
about the
social,
religious,
and
educational
issues of his
day.
 "Dover Beach" is a short lyric (a category of poetry that
expresses subjective thoughts and feelings, often in a
songlike style or form) poem by English poet Matthew
Arnold.
 It was first published in 1867 in the collection New
Poems, but surviving notes indicate its composition
may have begun as early as 1849.
 The most likely date is 1851.
 Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) wrote "Dover Beach"
during or shortly after a visit he and his wife made to
the Dover region of south-eastern England
 The title location and subject of the poem's descriptive
opening lines is the shore of the English ferry port of
Dover, facing France at the narrowest part of the
English Channel, where Arnold honeymooned in 1851.
 The opening stanza of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover
Beach” is a soothing description of what is believed to
be Matthew Arnold looking out the window of his
honeymoon cottage over a moonlit pebble beach of the
Dover area of Southeastern England.
 The opening stanza of “Dover Beach” is meant to lull
the reader into a peaceful composure, imagining the
scene with the entire divine splendor that Arnold was
writing with.
 Arnold begins with a naturalistic and detailed
nightscape of the beach at Dover in which auditory
imagery plays a significant role.
 The beach, however, is bare, with only a hint of
humanity in a light that "gleams and is gone”.
 Reflecting the traditional notion that the poem was
written during Arnold's honeymoon, one critic notes
that "the speaker might be talking to his bride.”
 The first stanza can be divided into two parts.
 In the first part (line one to line six) the lyrical I
describes the motions of the sea in a very positive way.
 The words “to-night” (l. 1), “moon” (l.2) and “night-air”
(l.6) indicate the time.
 To create a very harmonious mood the poet utilises
adjectives such as “fair”, “tranquil” and “calm”.
 Matthew Arnold uses an anaphora (A rhetorical term
for the repetition of a word or phrase at the start of
successive clauses) (”Gleams” and “Glimmering” l.4/5),
to underline the harmonious atmosphere of the first
six lines.
 The word “only” in line seven can be seen as a caesura
(A pause in a line of verse dictated by sense or natural
speech rhythm rather than by metrics.) After line
seven the harmonious mood of the first lines is
changing into a sad mood. The word ‘sea’ is
personified by the verb “meets” in line seven.
 The expression “moon-blanched land” create a mystic
atmosphere.
 With the words of sound “listen”, “hear” and “roar” in
line nine Arnold wants to activate the reader’s senses
to involve him in his poem.
 Also, he involves the readership by using the
imperatives “come” and “listen”.
 The verbs “begin” “cease” and “again begin” show that
the pebbles” motions are a never ending movement.
 By using the words “sadness” and “tremulous” the
pebbles’ motions are illustrated in a woeful and
threatening way.
 The first 2 stanzas can be seen as a description of a
present status, whereas the second stanza is a
reference to the past.
 In the third stanza the poet uses “Sophocles” to show
that the people for a long time thought about a
comparison between sea and human misery.
 Sophocles (495 – 406), the Greek tragedy playwright,
is described by Matthew Arnold as hearing the same
sound in the Mediterranean when inspired to write his
tragedies such as King Oedipus, and Electra.
 Critics differ widely on how to interpret this image of
the Greek Classical age.
 One critic sees a difference between Sophocles in the
classical age of Greece interpreting the "note of
sadness" humanistically, while Arnold in the industrial
nineteenth century hears in this sound the retreat of
religion and faith.
 A more recent critic connects the two as artists,
Sophocles the tragedian, Arnold the lyric poet, each
attempting through words to transform this note of
sadness into "a higher order of experience.”
 Arnold looks at two aspects of this naturalistic scene,
its soundscape (in the first and second stanza) and the
retreating actions of the tide (in the third stanza).
 Arnold hears the sound of the sea as "the eternal note
of sadness".
 Sophocles, a 5th century BC Greek playwright who
wrote tragedies of fate and the will of the gods, also
heard this same sound as he stood upon the shore of
the Aegean Sea.
 The fourth stanza abstracts the image of the sea and
uses it as a metaphor (”sea of faith”) to show that
“once” (l.22) humanity was more religious.
 The metaphor of “bright girdle furled” emphasizes that
faith was inseparable to earth.
 The words “But now” in line 24 are a caesura.
 The first three lines of the stanza create a feeling of
hope, whereas the last lines sound sad and hopeless.
 Having examined the soundscape, Arnold turns to the
action of the tide itself and sees in its retreat a
metaphor for the loss of faith in the modern age once
again expressed in an auditory image
 "But now I only hear/Its melancholy, long,
withdrawing roar”.
 The final stanza begins with an appeal to love, then
moves on to the famous ending metaphor.
 Critics have varied on their interpretation of the first
two lines of this stanza; one calls them a "perfunctory
gesture...swallowed up by the poem's powerfully dark
picture”, while another sees in them "a stand against a
world of broken faith”.
 Midway between these is the interpretation of one of
Arnold's biographers who describes being "true/To
one another" as "a precarious notion" in a world that
has become "a maze of confusion”
 The last stanza refers to the misery of humanity and
can be seen as a conclusion of the preceding stanzas.
 The lyrical ‘I’ compares the world to a “land of dreams”
which is “various” “beautiful” and “new”.
 This means that the world and the people who live on
it might be happy and live together in peace.
 To underline this mood, the lyrical ‘I’ uses the word
“love” at the beginning of the stanza. The verb “seems”
shows that it is only a dream or an illusion of the
lyrical ‘I’ which can never become reality.
 In these emotionally charged lines Arnold pleas that
they cling to each other against a land that is beautiful
as only an exterior to an unfeeling, Godless world.
 The beautiful world, the world of the Romantic, is a
lie; there is only the callous Modern world, devoid of
answered hopes or prayers.
 The simile with which the poem ends is most likely an
allusion to a passage in Thucydides' account of the
Peloponnesian War.
 Thucydides describes an ancient battle which occurred
on a similar beach during the invasion of Sicily by the
Athenians.
 The battle took place at night; the attacking army
became disoriented while fighting in the darkness and
many of their soldiers ignorantly killed each other.
 This final image has, also, been variously interpreted
by the critics.
 The "darkling plain" of the final line has been
described as Arnold's "central statement" of the
human condition
 A more recent critic has seen the final line as "only
metaphor" and, thus, susceptible to the "uncertainty"
of poetic language.