DOVER BEACH (MATTHEW ARNOLD)

Critical Appreciation

Fashions and taste change, appraisals vary and each age judges old writers afresh,
but whatever the assessments of Arnold’s 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 Arnold’s poetry.
Almost all Arnold’s 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 poet’s 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 Arnold’s temperament, Nature does not affect any joy or peace. It identifies
his melancholy. It simply adds to the poet’s 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 Tennyson’s “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 Eliot’s “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.