DOVER BEACH

“Dover Beach” is a dramatic monologue of thirty-seven lines, divided into four

unequal sections of fourteen, six, eight, and nine lines.

The poem opens with images of a calm and serene sea. ‘The sea is calm tonight’. The
poet and his love are in a room overlooking the Dover beach.

‘The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits;’

The beautiful moon is reflected in the calm waters of the ocean. The poet looks out
toward the French coast, and notices that the light ‘Gleams and is gone’. The light
may indicate the light of ‘humanity and faith’ which is now ‘gone’. The poet looks at
the English side and notes the ‘glimmering and vast’ cliffs of England. The shining
and enormous cliffs are perhaps an indication that Matthew Arnold felt that the
revival of faith was possible only in England.

The speaker calls his love to the window to enjoy the sweet night air.

The tranquility of the scene is destroyed by ‘grating roar’ of the pebbles that are
drawn into the sea and flung back on the shore. The motion of the waves throws the
pebbles on the shore endlessly in a ‘tremulous cadence’. The harsh sound of the
pebbles thrown on the beach seem to resound with ‘the eternal note of sadness’.

The dark and volatile visual imagery represents the decline of humanity and the
endless suffering of mankind.

Stanza 2

The poet’s mind flashes back to Sophocles who had the same experience
on the shore of the Aegean Sea many centuries ago. Sophocles was a fifth century
Greek playwright renowned for tragedies like Oedipus Rex and Antigone. The same
harsh sound on the sea shore had ‘brought into his mind the turbid ebb and flow of
human misery’. The murky coming and going of the waves had made him think of the
endless suffering of mankind, which had been the dominant subject of his plays.
Sophocles too, had found a larger message in the ‘grating roar’ of the pebbles.

The speaker says that ‘we find also in the sound a thought’. The past is
connected to the present by the endless cycle of misery.

(Stanza 3)

The speaker laments about the loss of faith which is the root of the
pessimism. Religion was a comfort. It used to permeate people’s lives and protected
them from doubt and despair.
‘The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full’

Faith encircled the world like a ‘bright girdle’. Like the sea, Faith once girded the
world, like an attractive, bright-colored scarf tightly binding all together. Now, the sea
of faith is receding. The power of religion which gave unity and meaning is declining,
leaving behind only the chill wind whistling over the desolate beach. The
metaphorical sea of faith has receded and left in its wake despair and emptiness. Only
the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of the sea of faith can be heard in the ‘night-
wind’. The retreating of the sea is symbolic of the loss of faith. The sound of
hopelessness can be heard along the ‘vast edges of the sea’ . People do not know what
to believe in any more. Religion united society and brought people together.

The individual words like ‘melancholy’, ‘drear’, ‘naked’ recreate the feeling of
sadness.

The only hope lies in love and compassion. The poet turns from the
troubling scene to his love, seeking to find some meaning and stability in a world that
is otherwise devoid of joy.

‘Ah, love, let us be true

To one another!

Only love and compassion can restore man’s faith in goodness. In the vision of the
poet, there is nothing else possible to give meaning to life. The world, which is
apparently beautiful and new is in fact not so.

The world that seems like a ‘land of dreams’ which is ‘so various, so beautiful, so
new’, can offer none of the promises it makes. The world’s beauty is an illusion. It
does not offer joy, love, light, certitude, peace, help for pain.

The calm of the opening lines is deceptive. The reality of life is different.

‘We are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night’.

Life is a confused struggle. The world is like is a battlefield at night where

soldiers rush about, pursuing and firing at shadows, unable to tell friend from foe. It is
a dark plain where ignorant and confused battles are fought and soldiers rush firing at
shadows.
 The poet felt that the loss of faith was an outcome of modernity. Nineteenth
century England was in conflict over the new scientific theories which clashed with
religion. Science challenged the precepts of religion and there was nothing to give
force and meaning to life.