Critically Appreciate the Poem “Dover Beach.”

Answer

Critically appreciate the poem “Dover Beach.”

“Dover Beach” (1867) is a poem with the mournful tone of an elegy. Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) visited Dover Beach with his wife for their honeymoon immediately after marriage. It is a dramatic monologue. Here, Mono means single, and Logue means speaker. From a deeper level, it is an elegy for the loss of religious faith. People lost their religious beliefs because of the development of science and commerce, and they were morally bankrupt.

Critical Summary of the Poem: At the very outset of the poem, Arnold represents the beautiful scenery of Dover Beach. He enjoys the peaceful night from the window. The sea is calm, the moon is fair, and the tide is full. His heart is busy collecting and observing the natural beauty. 

Suddenly, he noticed the waves of the sea were withdrawing the pebbles. The pebbles were being forced to move, which the poet felt was a domination. Now, the poet can listen to the grating roar/noise of the pebbles that brings “the eternal notes of sadness.” The waves are compared with the realistic world. They create violence and cause a sense of insecurity. The pebbles are compared with the human beings forced to move from religious faith and morality to the materialistic world.  

In the 2nd stanza, Arnold mentions Sophocles (497-406 B.C). Sophocles was a great tragedian in ancient Greece. His tragedies bear the sadness of human beings.  Arnold says that Sophocles heard the same sounds in the Aegean Sea of his time. Arnold says about him reflecting on his great tragedies. Sophocles showed the helplessness and tragic fall of human beings as a tragedian.  He includes, 

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; 

Arnold refers to Sophocles’s name as a touchstone that provides a sense of security in this insecure world.

In the third stanza, Arnold exposes the reason or cause of sadness. For scientific discovery and commercial expansion, people engaged themselves only to earn money, wealth, and property. They had no religious faith. They were devoid of morality. The sea here is a metaphor for religious faith. Once, religion offered security. People led secure, enjoyable, calm, and quiet lives, holding morality and religious belief. But now, the waves of the sea are forcefully withdrawing the pebbles.

People have no security of religion; religious security was in the past. People suffer from moral and spiritual crises due to the loss of religious belief. In the final stanza, Arnold finds a source of hope in this insecure world: personal love. In this cruel society, only personal love can offer hope and a sense of security. He rightly claims, 

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another.

The world is loveless and uncertain. Arnold told his beloved to be true because there is also a scope of falseness in love. At the end of the final stanza, Arnold uses the military image. People fight against one another at night.

The Figure of Speech: The poem “Dover Beach” is replete with the use of figures of speech such as allusion, personification, simile, metaphor, images, and symbols.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery;

The above lines are an instance of allusion, but there is a pack of symbolic significance.

Symbols: The poem uses symbols such as the sea, which signifies loss of religious faith and spirituality; naked Pebbles, which symbolise human beings’ weakness of morality; and personal love, which symbolises the light of hope.

Stanza Pattern: The poem is written in irregular stanza patterns, but they are musical. There is no fixed stanza pattern like pentameter or hexameter.

Tone: Dover Beach is based on an elegiac tone or pessimistic tone. The sadness is in a materialistic world.

In termination, this poem alone can make Arnold eternal in the history of English literature, and it has popularised and acclaimed Arnold to the critics and readers.