Desert Island Poems: Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

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Dover Beach

By Matthew Arnold

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 Ægean, 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.

In 1988 an impetuous Matthew Arnold wrote 'People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.' I describe this as an impetuous remark from Arnold only because Dover Beach, arguably his most famous, most anthologised poem, while being distinctive and memorable and certainly well crafted, is hardly a poem of clarity. In fact, as I'll go on to argue, I think its longevity, its permanence is down to its ambiguity and refusal to take a stance or make one definitive argument about the mid to late nineteenth century the author found himself in, but also due to its formal shapeshifting, its refusal to be either formless or overly formal, like much of the other Victorian poetry of its day.

To be honest, it's a bit of an odd poem; in many ways it conforms to a Victorian love of rhyme, but the line lengths and rhythm are anything but regular and conventional for its time. Then we see the inconsistent, varied lengths of stanzas which make it appear, on first glance, like something written in the early twentieth century as opposed to the Victorian era. So, yes, it's a bit of a hard poem to place formally, but also conceptually. However, these are the reasons I love the poem (the way it kicks against the formal literary conventions of the day) but also how the only way it's able to do this is by being incredibly well crafted; it's a poem underpinned by a meticulous craft and precision. I suspect these are also the reasons why more and more readers are drawn to it today.

Another reason I've chosen this poem is due to a current holiday to the north coast of France and standing on those beaches, looking back towards England and thinking about the big political issue of the day, immigration, and the symbolism of Dover Beach in relation to that.

A dull opening or something more complicated?

The first aspect of the poem that surprises is how it's set at night. Most people go to the coast during the daytime for the best views, to be able to see the sea. At night, this view is rendered impossible, or at least significantly impeded by the lack of light reflecting off the waves. So, we might ask: who goes walking by the coast at night? Well, perhaps a poet who wants to see things a little differently and wants to present that slightly different version of the world to the reader. The opening line is short and end-stopped, giving a conversational, demotic, matter-of-fact tone. We cannot accuse Arnold here of over-writing the opening line. The second and third lines continue this tone with 'The tide is full, the moon lies fair/ upon the straits.' His description of the scene is rather flat, depicted as 'calm', 'full' and 'fair'. The sea is not roiling and the moon is not glistening, just 'full and 'calm' and 'fair'. So, the poem begins in a quiet manner and dare I say a pretty dull one. But then comes a shift when referring to England as 'the cliffs of England stand,/ glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.' So, here we have a contrast and balance which not only is in keeping with the coming and going of the seascape he's presenting but also the coming and going of short and long lines, as well as the coming and going of demotic and more self-consciously poetic registers. And it's this sense of tension which also points towards Arnold's own philosophical and religious inner turmoil, raised an orthodox Christian but living in an age of science. The poem is a classic example of how formal tensions on the page are mimetic of the author's own ideological conflicts.

Where is he?

To read this opening we'd think the writer is on the coast, standing looking over it, but it's not until the seventh line we realise he's actually inside, at the window as he writes 'Come to the window, sweet is the night air!' So, this is a poem written from the interior of a house as opposed to on the cliff itself. Why is this important? Well, this adds to the conflicts I've just mentioned for here is a poet observing the exterior world from the comfort of the interior; it's a poem which pits the internal against the external, in such a range of ways.

What's more, in light of this context, the details in the poem seem incredibly vivid for somebody who is noting them from a window. Despite the fact he's standing at a remove from the scene, this is not a passive, detached poem, but one that's incredibly involved, active and alive. We see this in the lines:

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling...

The poet is not saying 'Look! you see the grating roar' but 'Listen!' showing a preoccupation with the sound of the scene, a motif he pursues later in the stanza when he writes:

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

We note how 'Tremulous', 'cadence' and 'note' are all technical terms from music and that rather than seeing this as a composition of only land and sea, Arnold views the seascape as a complex aural composition. This eternal note of sadness seems to ring throughout the poem, as Arnold continues to explore it in the next stanza, as he shifts into a more literary, allusive gear by referring to Sophocles who 'Heard it on the Ægean'. So not only is this note one that resonates in that evening as Arnold looks out on the Dover seascape, and not only does it resonate throughout this poem, but also seems to be one that has resonated throughout all of literature, even in the time of Sophocles.

But what is the significance of this note? He writes how it brought to mind for Sophocles the 'turbid ebb and flow/ of human misery' and certainly this is a poem full of angst and anguish, culminating as it does with an image of conflict and tension as opposed to a neat resolution, and this is despite its final rhyming couplets. What we can be sure of, though, is how this poem, despite being a poem titled Dover Beach, is a poem more interested in the sound of the scene as opposed to the images themselves. It's an aural poem over and above a poem of images. This can even be seen in the poet's formal decisions, particularly his deft inclusion of rhyme which he's woven throughout the poem. This builds, then, the soundscape of Arnold's seascape.

Rhyme

So, on that note, as it were, let's turn to Arnold's use of rhyme. The rhyme of this poem is really quite interesting as it's so inconsistent. There almost seems to be something improvisatory to the poem, as if he's making up the rhymes as he goes. But, there's nothing wrong with that, of course, and why would there be? In fact, perhaps this leads to a more natural way of writing and is all the more impressive as he shows a skill to be able to circle back to rhymes from four lines previously; for example, look at 'furled' and 'world' in the third stanza or 'new' and 'true' in the last one. 'Faith' and 'breath' is also noteworthy and I wonder whether this shows Arnold slightly stretching the credibility of the rhyme scheme, especially as 'The Sea of Faith' is just one line on its own. Elsewhere, we feel that the short line lengths are governed not out of Arnold's choice for how they scan but for how they maintain his rather Heath-Robinson rhyme scheme, which he seems to somehow, just-about hold together. Some would argue, though, (and perhaps I would include myself in their number) that the almost haphazard nature of the rhyme is in keeping with the rather chaotic scene of the sea meeting land. Indeed, the poem seems to become more chaotic as it progresses; it begins with 'The sea is calm tonight.' and ends 'where ignorant armies clash by night.' Dover Beach is a poem which unfurls, to adapt a word from the poem, as it goes on.

'Hearing it by this distant northern sea.'

So, as the poem unfurls, we discover that it is a poem fixated on sound, a poem about sound as much as anything else. And we can see this in the phrase that the sound of the sea, not the sea itself, is at the heart of this poem, and becomes a metaphor not only for reflection, for thought, but for poetry itself. It is the sound of the sea where Arnold finds 'a thought', after all. Indeed, in the next stanza, this focus on the sound of the sea intensifies as he writes:

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.

As the poem progresses, then, it is the sound of the sea that Arnold ends up with, and it is only by the sound of its 'melancholy, long, withdrawing roar...' that he's able to envisage the 'naked shingles of the world.' It is only through the sound of the sea that Arnold is able to access its image. Not only that, but it's a sound that diminishes 'retreating, to the breath/ of the night-wind...' This diminution at this point of the poem helps to give an apt platform for the exclamation at the start of the last stanza. This diminution has been happening, though, throughout the poem; earlier we read about the 'grating roar' which then became 'turbid' and then 'melancholy, long, withdrawing' before 'retreating to the breath/ of the night-wind'. We can see, or hear, rather, how Arnold is placing sound at the forefront of this poem; the sea at Dover Beach is simply a vehicle for sound which in turn connects him not only to writers of the past, but to writing itself, to faith itself, thought itself, to a sense of his own humanity, in itself.

The Ending

So, where does all of this rumination on sound lead Arnold? Does it give him hope or simply make him 'melancholy'? Well, let's turn to the poem's final stanza which begins with the epiphanic exclamation 'Ah, love, let us be true/

To one another!' After the diminution of the 'grating roar' to 'the breath/ of the night-wind' it seems that Arnold is in silence, and it's only at this point, when he's no longer harangued by the sounds of the sea that he's able to think clearly and indeed positively as he writes in the imperative 'let us be true' suggesting the inconstant nature of the sound of the sea has compelled him to seek stability, consistency, that somehow in its comings and goings there lacked a sense of truth, or something to latch on to. So, with all faith lost, he turns to his 'love' as the last option of permanence in a world of ephemeral sounds. Indeed, this is seen again in the last two lines where Arnold returns to the motif of sound as he refers to how the 'darkling plain' is 'swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight'. It is the word 'alarms' here which I find most interesting as it fits with the sonic thematic domain Arnold has been pursuing thus far. That the ignorant armies 'clash', an onomatopoeic word, generating a cacophonic sound itself, is also worth pausing over. At the start of the poem 'The sea is calm tonight' suggesting, near silence, and peace, but now at the end of the poem there are 'confused alarms' and 'clash'. It is through, I'd argue, this motif of noise and sound, compared to silence and stillness, that Arnold conveys his confusions in the face of a modernising world. It is chiefly through his building of a conflicting soundscape in the poem that he is able to portray his own conflicted sense of self. He doesn't seem to know whether to find beauty in the sound of the sea or to want to muffle it out, finding it all a bit much. It is this confusion of Arnold that makes this poem so beguiling and, dare I say, mysterious to the reader. There is no neat resolution, and he leaves us, instead, with 'ignorant armies' who 'clash by night.' This noise may be different to the 'grating roar' of the sea, but it's still ever present and aggravating Arnold.

Ultimately, it is through his depiction of sound and noise that Arnold paints himself as an uneasy, restless character in an uneasy and restless period, in a poem that is formally uneasy and restless in its line lengths and erratic rhyme scheme. And yet, it's exactly this restlessness which gives the poem its cohesion.