Poem of the Week – Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold was a Victorian poet, critic and cultural guru. Often overshadowed by his more famous contemporaries, Tennyson and Browning, Arnold’s legacy relies as much on his prose, as on his poetry. He was fully aware of his unique ranking in the poetic league table of the time and his special place among some of the most accomplished poets of that century, saying in a letter to his mother; “it might be fairly urged that I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning; yet because I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn as they have had theirs”. 

This week’s poem, Dover Beach, is perhaps Arnold’s best known lyric. It was first published in 1867 but may have been written as early as 1849. In it, the speaker surveys the vast pelagic vistas of the English Channel and laments the tumult and tragedy of the human experience. It ends with a passionate plea to the power of love to, “let us be true/ to one another”, before vividly depicting the tenebrous circumstances of life on earth (“we are here as on a darkling plain/swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/where ignorant armies clash by night”). We hope you enjoy this week’s poem as much as we did. 

Dover Beach

The sea is calm tonight,

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! You hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back and fling

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar,

Retreating to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold