Dover Beach

        Pre-occupation with morality and insistence on sobriety is the essence of Matthew Arnold’s temperament. Having a unique distinguished place in Victorian literature, his intellectual pessimism also has had its influence on modern literature. A critical study of Dover Beach makes the readers realize that it is an impressive and memorable poetic expression of the characteristic mood of the poet regarding life and the values and feelings pertaining to it. “Dover Beach” is most often classified as a dramatic monologue , a poetic form that Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Robert Browning, found extremely attractive. Beginning with the image of seascape, Arnold’s main theme is not idealization of nature’s beauty; it is the evocation of “the eternal note of sadness” in human life. The allusion to Sophocles and his study of “the turbid ebb and flow/ Of human misery”, rings in the key-note of the poem.

Like the “moon-blanch’d sand” of the sea-coast, Arnold’s spirit is melancholy-blanched. He is frightened with the anticipation of a total collapse of order and harmony which controls and keeps life beautiful and meaningful. He started by saying “The sea is calm to-night,” but the calm and poise which he so admires is fast disappearing from life. The “sea of faith” which once wrapped around the earth “like the folds of a bright girdle” is now beginning to ebb away. This sea represents a trust in religion and its institutions that has been eroded by a host of changes in the nineteenth century, from the secular Enlightenment thought to the global imperialism and the Industrial Revolution. 

He has a prophetic vision of the world as a dark battle-field on which everyone is fighting uncertainly without knowing how to distinguish between a friend and a foe: “And we are here as on a darkling plain……/ Where ignorant armies clash by night.” The entire experience is that of a worst nightmare. As against these allied moods of pessimism, there is at the beginning of the last stanza, a gesture of hope, a positive spirit of seeking cure. “Ah, love, let us be true/ To one another!.....”

But all these sounds faint in the shadow of the overwhelming darkness and chaos that rules human situations, and because even the surface attractiveness of life is liable to prove treacherous. He appeals but does not know how far his partner would reciprocate, the fear ‘if’ casts its shadow over the last resort of love.