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The sea is calm to-night.
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-blanch'd 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 Ęgean, 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 furl'd.
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, 1851
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was an agnostic.
He worked as a Schools Inspector for 35 years becoming Chief Inspector of
Schools in England in 1884. He was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford
University for ten years in 1857. His poetry was written mostly in the years
1847- 1857 after which he wrote many essays on the need to develop an
understanding culture. He was a noted social critic.
The music is a setting of the poem, composed by Samuel
Barber and performed by Thomas Allen, baritone, and the Endellion String
Quartet. You will be able to hear it with Real Audio.
Matthew
Arnold's writing
Dover Beach is on the A level English syllabus in
UK. Since I do receive enquiries from students each year, I decided to put some
of my own notes here which might be helpful.
The poem should be understood in the context of
Arnold's personal life. Son of Dr Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of the famous
Rugby School, he won an open scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. The
family's summer home in the Lake District neighboured that of William
Wordsworth, with whom they became friends.
Dover Beach was probably written in June 1851
following a visit to Dover en route to Europe with his new wife, Lucy Wightman.
The poem was not published until 1867.
It is a poem of maturity reflecting his own felt
need to commit himself and his life. Some of his earlier poems were inspired by
a French girl, Marguerite, from whom he was to be separated for the rest of his
life. These poems highlight his realization that love enhances loneliness, a
sense of loss, and is a self-imposed prison.
"How vain a thing is human love"
"The heart can bind itself alone
And faith may oft be unreturn'd
Self-swayed our feelings ebb and swell"
Only in a commitment to revere and develop the
perfected qualities in Man can Man hope to evade the inherent insecurity of life
and the transience of 'natural' feeling. This is a matter of will supported by
feeling. Not an inflexible will, nor a single viewpoint, but the ability to be
open to experience, react to it, absorb it and re-fashion it to move towards
'perfection'.
Less than commitment to this path, collapse into
uncontrolled feeling and indulging of desire, leads to moral anarchy. Not
in the sense that people are intrinsically evil but that they may lose the path
to salvation.
Reading Arnold, you will come across contrasts
between Poets, Puritans and Philistines. For Arnold, the Philistine was
"the great middle part of the English nation" and his own class.
Some quotations from Matthew Arnold's prose
"the poetry of later paganism (Hellenic
civilization, ed.) lived by the senses and understanding; the poetry of
medieval Christianity lived by the heart and imagination. But the main element
of the modern spirit's life is neither the senses and understanding, nor the
heart and imagination; it is the imaginative reason."
From Pagan and Religious
Medieval Sentiment, 1864
"Goethe puts the standard, once for all,
inside every man instead of outside him."
From Heinrich Heine, 1863
"The pursuit of perfection, then, is the
pursuit of sweetness and light. He who works for sweetness and light, works to
make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who
works for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery,
culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness
and light. It has one even yet greater! -- the passion for making them prevail.
It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man."
From Culture and Anarchy,
1867-1868
The design theme of this
page
The background is intended to represent the pebble beach at Dover, and
metaphorically the darkness of the world in which Arnold felt himself to be
living. The title graphic, Dover Beach, reflects the recurrent glimmer of
hope echoed in the poem by "the light gleams, and is gone".
Some links
Essay by I.
Babbitt, a review of Matthew Arnold: How to Know Him, by Stuart P.
Sherman
About
Matthew Arnold
From the Victorian
web: Matthew Arnold, an overview
Resources for 6th form pupils, At the Stockport
Metropolitan Borough Council site. National Curriculum
Web guide from
literaryhistory.com
Travel
sites
Personal
sites
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