DOVER BEACH (MATTHEW ARNOLD)

Critical Appreciation

Fashions and taste change, appraisals vary and each age judges
old writers afresh, but whatever the assessments of Arnolds
poetry is, his towering personality as a critic and a poet will
always inspire awe and admiration. He was a versatile genius and
was one of the most men learned men of England in Victorian
age. According to critics, the spiritual void of modern life had
been the theme of Arnolds poetry. Almost all Arnolds poetry was
written during his young manhood. The few pieces of later date
are for the most part resuscitation of earlier moods. The poems
are generally variations upon themes of youthful anguish and
aspirations. They reflect the poets inner anguish that he
experienced in an age of unrest.
Dover Beach of Matthew Arnold is not only a powerful lyric,
it truly mirrors the age which emerged in the second half of the
nineteenth century. The impact of science especially of Darwin
was very deep. By proving that man was not the creation of God
but a natural growth of environment and heredity, made a man
doubtful about the very existence of God. There was a gradual
loss of this appearance of faith, love and trust. Arnold, a sensitive
soul like Hardy, expresses this loss of values in the poem Dover
Beach. The poem has four stanzas and the sea is a background.
Arnold does not describe Nature as Wordsworth does. To a man of
Arnolds temperament, Nature does not affect any joy or peace. It
identifies his melancholy. It simply adds to the poets sadness. In
this poem, Arnold describes sea not as a store of beauty and joy
but rather as a reminder of eternal rhythmic rise and fall in
human experiences.
The poem opens with a sensuous picture of the moonlight. In
Arnold the moonlight is not associated with rose and romance. It
is associated with meditation and melancholy. The tide is full and
the moon is fair. There is silence everywhere. It suits the reflective
mood of the3 poet. In Tennysons In Memoriam, the calm of the
morning suits the calmer grief. The poet reflects on the loss of
faith in spiritual values. Both Tennyson and Arnold use the images
of seas and waves. They feel that seas expresses their sorrows
through waves beating against stones. In Arnold, the beating of
weaves reminds the poet of the vicissitudes in the life of
humanity:
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal notes of sadness in.
The notes of eternal sadness in the life of man has been brought
out with the help of words like begin, cease, and begin. Arnold
further points out that this was the feeling of Sophocles when he
saw the rise and fall of waves. Sophocles, his favourite author had
similar contemplation on the turbid ebb and flow of human
misery as he listened to the sad Aegean Sea! But as Arnold
muses on, standing on the Dover Beach, he finds the world full of
only shingles and nothing else. This melancholy musing may be
attributed to the influence of an age in which he lived, for it was
essentially an age of agnosticism and skepticism.
Whereas Eliot discovers in the sea the symbol of temporal
values, as we see in his Four Quartets, Arnold sees in the sea
the symbol of faith. Like Eliot, Arnold presents a contrast between
the faith and spiritual values of people in ancient times and the
loss of faith in the present time. As ancient people lived by faith,
this faith protected them like a bright belt. Now the poet could
only hear its melancholy, long, with drawing roar. It is
retreating. This is so because the world is denuded of all spiritual
values. The sea of faith has been set in the contrast with breath
of nightwind.As the breath of nightwind chokes the sea of faith,
there is nothing but moral anarchy and spiritual chaos. It reminds
us of Yeats poem
The Second Coming which delineates a state of chaos.
In the last stanza, the poet lays emphasis on the significance
of personal relationship. Arnold suggests that when public values
fail to sustain life, people can live by private affections by being
true to one another. Private values can alone sustain life in a
world which is a land of dreams and is short of positive values like
joy, love and light. In the last four lines the poet tries to stress the
idea that people have lost the idea of direction. The world has
been visualised as a battlefield. People are threatened by
confused alarms. The get the impression of a constant struggle
going on without any purpose. The use of military metaphors of
battle field and armies give dramatic energy to the poem.
Words like confusion, darkling, ignorant and night, show the
lack of directional energy in people and the growth of doubt and
suspicion.
The whole poem is surcharged with the spirit of melancholy. The
sad emotions of the poet are brought out by the tragic rhythms
and the modulation of tone from gay in the opening to the tragic
last section of the poem. Sea-saw rhythm has been used to
suggest the ups and downs in humanity. The style is simple
because Arnold always prefers simple and lucid style. The poem is
highly lyrical and it is remarkable for its use of imagery.
The Dover Beach can be compared to Eliots Wasteland
and Yeats The Second Coming. In all these poems we find the
world devoid of values. Dover Beach is a symbol of love and
faith and there is implied suggestion to maintain love in this
broken world.