DOVER BEACH: TEXT OF THE POEM

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 gean, 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.

DOVER BEACH INTRODUCTION

In A Nutshell
Matthew Arnold was a pretty serious dude. He believed in the Power and
Beauty of Art with a capital P, and was all about the value of really
understanding the past and the great tradition of literature. He was a poet, a
scholar, a critic, and one of the big-name literary figures of the Victorian era.
Sounds like the recipe for a great career, right?
But he was also living in an uncertain time. The winds of change were blowing,
and he lets us hear them whipping by in his poetry. See, in the decades before
he wrote this poem, England had gone through rapid industrialization, which in
many ways upended a way of life that had been stable for centuries. The
British empire was beginning to expand its reach across the globe, and the
conflicts that would come with that expansion were picking up steam as well. In
other words, Arnold was a man on the brink between the old world and the
new, right on the edge of the modern era, and he has a really cool, visionary
sense of what that means.
"Dover Beach" is one of his most famous poems, although he wrote many
more. It's still included in anthologies and memorized by school kids today,
almost 150 years after it was published in 1867. Why that staying power? Well,
we think this poem does a brilliant job of capturing just how lonely it can be to
live in the modern world.
You know what we're talking about. As family ties rupture, as old systems of
faith diminish, it's easy to feel as if we've been abandoned on "a darkling plain"
(35) without friends or hope. What's cool about this poem is that it both
describes this suffering and helps to make it better. It tackles the pain and the
uncertainty of living in the modern world, but does it in a way that leaves us
feeling like poetry can still matter, even in our times. In that way, Arnold fuses
the literary tradition he loved with the new world that he could see coming
the one we're living in right now.

WHY SHOULD I CARE?

We're all for poems that talk about the happy stuff like love and birds and trees
and taking a nap (okay, maybe we don't know of any nap poems, but you get
the idea). At the same time, that's not all poetry can do.
It can also tackle the rough stuff in life, like pain and fear and suffering and
loss. "Dover Beach" is a great example of a poem that's honest about how dark
and scary life can be sometimes. The speaker of this poem just flat out tells us
that we shouldn't expect life to be full of "joy" or "love" (33). He wants to shake
us awake, to tell us that, in the world we live in now there is no certainty, no
"help for pain" (34). It's not like there isn't any love and happiness in it (the first
stanza is full of it) but he doesn't sugarcoat the bad stuff either.
So why would you want to read a poem about how life can be hard? Well, we
think most people figure out that life isn't all good stuff about the time they
find out Santa Claus isn't real (yeah, we're still kind of bummed about that one,
too).
So why should we save the beauty and power of a great poem for just the
bright side of life? We feel like being able to talk about lurking darkness and
fear makes it all a little less scary. Sure, "Dover Beach" is about loneliness, but
when we read it, we somehow feel less aloneand we bet you will, too.
DOVER BEACH SUMMARY
"Dover Beach" opens with a quiet scene. A couple looks out on the moonlit
water of the English Channel, and listens to the sound of the waves. Then, all of
a sudden it zooms out. And we mean way out.
See, the sound of the waves makes the speaker think first of ancient Greece.
Yep, Greece. Then he turns the sound of the surf into a metaphor for human
history, and the gradual, steady loss of faith that his culture has experienced.
The poem ends on a gorgeous, heartbreaking note, with the couple clinging to
their love in a world of violence and fear and pain.

STANZA 1 SUMMARY
Get out the microscope, because were going
through this poem line-by-line.

Line 1
The sea is calm tonight.
This first line gives us two simple, basic facts. It's nighttime, and the sea
is calm. Can't you just picture it? Hey, that's all we need to start building
a mental world.
As you'll see, "Dover Beach" will end up running back in time and all over
the world, but that image of the ocean at night will always be front-and-
center.
In addition to giving us the image that will anchor the poem, this line sets
a very particular tone. The words are short and clear.
The line ends with a period, making it a complete, simple sentence.
There's no activity, just stillness and simplicity. In a word, this line
is calm, just like the ocean.

Line 2
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Here we get a little more description of the setting of this poem. It's high
("full") tide, the moon is out, and it's beautiful ("fair").
We've pointed out how the first line was self-contained, a complete
thought in itself. In this line, the end of the line isn't the end of the
sentence, and the phrase "the moon lies fair" isn't complete? It makes
the reader want to know where the moon lies fair, or how. To find out, you
have to continue to the next line. That poetic technique, where a
sentence is broken up across more than one line, is called enjambment.
 We also want to point out that little break in the middle of the line
(marked by the comma). The line takes a pause here, between two
complete phrases. That fancy little trick is called a caesura, and it divides
the line into two parts.

Line 3
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
That moon that's lingering from the last line? Well, it turns out that it "lies
fair / Upon the straits." That just means that the moonlight is shining on a
narrow body of water ("the straits"). The speaker tells us that he can see
across the strait to the coast of France.
If we put this together with the title "Dover Beach," we get a pretty clear
idea of where the speaker is. He's on the coast of England, looking out at
the English Channel, which separates England from France. Dover is a
town (you might have heard of its famous white cliffs) right at the
narrowest point in the channel. The French town of Calais is just a little
over twenty miles away, which is why he can see the light there.
Notice the enjambment in this line, too. Arnold keeps us rolling from line
to line here, building up momentum in the beginning of the poem.

Lines 4-5
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Suddenly the light that he saw shines out and then disappears (with
Arnold's much prettier alliteration, it "Gleams and is gone").
When the light in France disappears, the speaker looks back at his own
coast. Here he sees the famous white cliffs of Dover, which are shining in
the moonlight out in bay. The bay, he reminds us, is "tranquil." This picks
up the image of calm water from line 1.
And once again we've got a the break in line 4. See how the line pauses
at the semicolon, and then the speaker turns to a new thought? Yep,
that's another caesura.

Line 6
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Here we get a little more information about what's happening in the
world of the poem. We learn that the speaker is indoors (in a room with a
window).
We also find out that he's talking to someone who must be in the room
with himthat's his audience.. We don't learn much about that person
yet, but our speaker wants him or her to come to window to smell the
"sweet" air.
 The tone of the poem is still really calm. Adjectives like "tranquil" and
"sweet" establish a relaxing, comforting mood here at the beginning of
things.

Lines 7-8
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Now, all of a sudden, we've got a little shift on our hands. As we look out
with the speaker and his companion, he says "Only." (Here that means
something like "But.")
Only what? What's the matter with this scene? Arnold is just beginning to
build our expectation.
The speaker draws our attention to the edge of the water, and the surf
("the long line of spray"). Instead of looking at the beautiful landscape as
a whole, we're looking at the specific point where the sea meets the land.
And check out that vivid image of the "moon-blanched land." Blanched
means "whitened" we might say "bleached." You know how bright
moonlight can make the whole world look white? Well, that's what our
speaker is talking about.

Line 9
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Before, we were imagining what this scene looked like. Now the speaker
tells his companion (and us) to change the frame, to use one of
our other senses.
Suddenly we're going to "Listen!" (that exclamation point is mean to
wake us up) to the sound of the water.
Turns out that sound isn't "calm" or "tranquil" like the moonlight on the
water. The speaker describes it as a "grating roar."
The harshness of the word "grating" might be a little surprising, since
there's nothing relaxing about a grating sound. It seems to Shmoop that
the atmosphere of this poem is changing. Let's keep a weather eye out
for more shifts in the future.

Lines 10-11
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
That "grating" sound from line? That comes from the sound of pebbles.
Those little rocks are being pulled out by the waves as they go out, and
then thrown back up on the beach ("strand" is another word for beach or
shore) when the waves come back in.
 Maybe you've heard that sound before, like a rhythmic rumble, a giant
breathing. The speaker really focuses in on the sound of the waves. He
wants us to really feel their inevitable, steady force. Because if one
thing's fore sure, it's that waves will continued to crash on beaches all the
world over.

Lines 12-13
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The grating sound of the pebbles starts, and then stops, and then starts
again. The speaker has a fancy way of describing this rhythm of the
ocean. He calls it a "tremulous cadence slow."
Let's break that one down, huh? "Tremulous" means shaky or trembling.
We think that comes from the fact that this one big sound is made up of
many little sounds of rolling pebbles. "Cadence" refers to the rhythm of
that repeated sound. That's a significant word to use in a poem of all
things, where rhythm is so crucial to the reading experience. The speaker
hears a slow rhythm in the sound of the waves, and it mingles in with the
rhythm of his poem.
And just what is the rhythm of this poem? Well, Arnold plays around with
that a little. The basic meter for the poem is iambic, which has just the
same kind of rolling rhythm as those waves.
Line 12 is actually a great example of that: Begin, and cease,
and then again begin. See? Perfect iambic pentameter.
That's not the case everywhere though; he switches things up a fair
amount. For more on that, see our "Form and Meter" section.

Line 14
The eternal note of sadness in.
Now the rubber really hits the road in this poem. We started out calm and
tranquil, but the first stanza ends on a much darker note, with the
introduction of a "note of sadness."
We think the word "note" is pretty key here. It picks up on the word
"cadence" up above, and makes us think that the sound of the world is
something like music.
This isn't just a temporary sadness, either. It's "eternal." Our speaker
clearly thinks that the music of the world has an endless sadness built
into it.
STANZA 2 SUMMARY
Get out the microscope, because were going
through this poem line-by-line.

Lines 15-16
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the gean, and it brought
Now the sound of the pebbles in the waves turns into a kind of time
machine, and takes the speaker (and us) on a mental journey back to
ancient Greece.
He imagines the famous playwright Sophocles heard the same sound as
he stood next to the Aegean Sea (that's the part of the Mediterranean
that separates Greece from Turkey).
This little allusion to the past keys us into Arnold's interest in the past,
and especially classical Greece and Rome. It also creates a connection
between the great poetic mind of Sophocles and our speaker. They are
linked, across the centuries, by the act of listening to the sea and
thinking about humanity.

Lines 17-18
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Sophocles was one of the great Greek authors of tragic playsyou know,
those bummer dramas where everyone ends up dead or miserable? So
it's probably not that surprising that the ocean makes him think of "the
turbid ebb and flow of human misery." "Turbid" means "cloudy, stirred up,
muddy and murky" and it's often used to refer to water.
So, Sophocles is imagining an analogy between human unhappiness and
cloudy water moving in and out ("the ebb and flow").
Also, have you been keeping an eye on how much enjambment this poem
has? This particular stanza (lines 15-20) is just one long sentence broken
up over six lines. This makes the connection between the distant past
and the present seem almost seamless.
See how he slips that "we" in at the end of line 18? He's zooming us back
to the present, without even ending the sentence. He could easily have
stopped and started the next line back in the present (although breaking
it up the way he does helps with the iambic meter). Instead, he just zips
back, without stopping, forcing us to keep moving at his pace.
Lines 19-20
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
Now we're fully back in the poem's present, back on the shore of the
English Channel. Here he calls the Channel "this distant northern sea." By
distant he just means far away from Sophocles and the Aegean.
Just like Sophocles, "we" find a thought in the sound of the waves. Who's
this "we," by the way? Line 18 is the first time the speaker has referred to
we. Maybe he just means him and his companion (whom he invited to the
window in line 6).
We've got a hunch he means something bigger, though. If it was just he
and his companion, he wouldn't need to talk about it.
We think he's including a lot of people in his "we"his readers, and
maybe all of the people living in his time and place. It's a way of both
drawing us in and making his observations seem universal.

STANZA 3 SUMMARY
Get out the microscope, because were going
through this poem line-by-line.

Lines 21-22
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Ooh, now we're really getting deep. Suddenly the sea grows from being
just a thing you look at or listen to, to a full-blown metaphor. Here the
"Sea of Faith" represents the "ocean" of religious belief in the worldall
of our faith put together. Notice that Arnold capitalizes this term and puts
it all by itself at the top of the stanza, so we're sure to notice that it's
super-important.
There was a time, the speaker says, when that "Sea of Faith" was at high
tide "full" just like the English Channel is right now.
He's really driving this whole ocean-as-metaphor thing hard.
But what's he referring to? Perhaps an earlier time, when religion was
more important in people's lives?

Line 23
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
When that ocean of faith was at its height, it was like a "bright girdle"
(that's like a fancy belt) rolled up ("furled") around the world. See what
 he did there? He just used a simile to compare his already-metaphorical
ocean to a beautiful belt.
This is kind of a tricky imageit's a little hard to tell how an ocean can be
furled around the world, or why exactly a girdle would have folds. We
think the whole idea is meant to be a little ornate and complex, because
what the speaker is describing, (the high tide of the sea of faith) is so
mysterious and beautiful.
For a moment, in this line, we're back in safe territory, away from human
misery and grating waves.

Lines 24-25
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Sadly, in this moment, the speaker thinks the sea of faith is a long way
from high tide. It's ebbing (getting lower) just like the ocean does.
The only sound he hears now is the roar of faith pulling away. We think
"melancholy, long withdrawing roar" has a totally sad, desolate feeling
don't you? The world's loss of faith makes our speaker truly miserable.

Lines 26-27
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
Here he keeps up the simile he started at the beginning of the stanza,
comparing all the faith on earth to an ocean that's steadily pulling away.
Faith is "retreating" from the world. It ebbs to "the breath of the night
wind." That's another great image of a powerful, rhythmic force in nature,
just like the "cadence" of the pebbles in the waves in line 13.
Check out how dark the language of this poem has turned all of a sudden.
There's a scary sense of size in those "vast edges" and real misery in the
word "drear." We've come a long way from the calm moonlit night that
started out this poem.

Line 28
And naked shingles of the world.
First, we should point out that in this case "shingles" refers to the loose
stones on the seashore (not something that goes on a roof).
The idea of the world being covered in "naked shingles" like a wet,
desolate beach is so spine-tinglingly bleak. It's such a hopeless image. As
faith pulls away, it leaves nothing behind but dreary desolation.
Well, that's uplifting.
STANZA 4 SUMMARY
Get out the microscope, because were going
through this poem line-by-line.

Lines 29-30
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
At the opening of the last stanza, we're back where were at the beginning
of the poem, in the room at the edge of the Channel.
The speaker finally lets us know who's he's talking to: his "love."
We spent the whole last stanza hearing about the fate of the world, and
the metaphorical ocean of faith. So this feels like a pretty big shift.
Suddenly the speaker's tone is personal, intimate, even desperate, as if
he was clinging to his love to escape the terrifying things he's just been
describing.
The idea of lovers being "true" to each other also picks up on the image
of lost faith from up above. Even if the world has lost its faith, maybe
they, in their small way, can hold on to some of it.
But note the enjambment between lines 29 and 30. First, he says to his
love, "let us be true." That could be a more general statement about
personal integrity. But then, squish it up with line 30, and you realize that
he wants them to be true to one another, which is a much smaller, more
intimate idea.
Maybe, just maybe, the idea of being true in the modern world is just too
big to handle. So in the end, all we can do is be true to one another. Let's
see if that plays out in the final lines of the poem.

Lines 31-32
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
There's been a contrast running through this whole poem. On the one
hand, there's the pretty view of the moonlit water that opens the poem.
So in the present, in the world the speaker and his lover can see before
them, things seem pretty much okay.
This happy world is "various" (that just means full of variety) and of
course beautiful and new. We think there might be a little allusion to the
story of Adam and Eve, the couple alone together with a beautiful new
world before them. Do you agree?
There's also a hint of trouble in the way the speaker calls this "a land of
dreams." On the one hand, that might mean that it's wonderful, but it
 might also suggest that this beautiful world is somehow unreal, which
makes it all the more precarious.

Lines 33-34
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
Now we see the truth, (or at least as the speaker sees it). It's not that the
world is part good and part bad. It's that the pretty part, which you can
see, the world of calm night and moonlight and peaceful beauty is an
illusion. It's the world he hears in the roaring of the surf that is real. And
it's awful.
The reality of the world is nothing but grim chaos. All of the things that
should make the world wonderful are gone. There is no joy, love, light,
certitude (that means "certainty" or security) or "help for pain."
The speaker has clearly lost that faith he was talking about in the third
stanza (lines 21-28). One thing faith can do for you is allow you to believe
in order and goodness in the world even when all you see is ugliness and
pain. Our speaker has lost that ability to believe in order, and sees only
the nightmare.
Maybe this is just Shmoop, but we think that even though these lines are
grim and sad, they are also kind of beautiful. There's something so sharp,
so simple, so raw in the way the speaker cuts away all those wonderful
things, one by one. We're gearing up for one heck of an ending,
Shmoopers.

Line 35
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Arnold brings the whole thing to a crashing finish here, with a famous
simile. Yep, this is one for the ages.
He begins the simile in this line, comparing the faithless ugliness of the
world to being in a flat and lightless place ("a darkling plain"). That's just
one gloomier image in what is shaping up to be a pretty dark ending to
this poem.

Line 36-37
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
The poem slams shut on us with the end of this final simile that the
speaker began in line 35.
The speaker and his love are not just stuck in the dark, but they are
"swept" by noise and confusion. People are struggling, running away (in
"flight") and sounding alarms.
 The world is not merely a dark and comfortless place. It's a battlefield.
But on this battlefield, the fighters can't see each other.
They are fighting at night, and presumably killing their friends as well as
their enemies. There's no marching, no even lines, no fancy hats and
polished buttons. Just misery, pain, terror and confusiona clash.
We've come a long way from the scene of peaceful beauty that opened
this poem. The mask has been ripped off the world, and "Dover Beach"
has shown us the chaos and ugliness within.

THE SEA
Symbol Analysis
The sea is everywhere in "Dover Beach." It shows up in different places and in
different forms, but we feel its power all over the place. Sometimes it's a
physical location, something you can actually see, like the English Channel or
the Aegean Sea, and sometimes it morphs into a metaphor for the fate of
humanity. Heavy stuff, for sure.
Line 1: This is a really simple opening line, focused on a really
simple image. We think that's a key part of this poem's effect. We start
with this calm, vivid picture in our heads, and from there everything
slowly dissolves away. Over 37 lines, the speaker strips away our
illusions, and shows us the nightmare behind this calm ocean.
Line 8: Another powerful image, this time of the sea meeting the land. It's
important to notice how much time Arnold spends making us really see
this vision of the coast of England in the moonlight. The sea is going to
turn into a huge metaphor in this poem (so stay tuned), but for now it's
just a pretty spot.
Line 16: In this line, the sea is part of an historical allusion. The speaker
uses the sea (in this case the Aegean, which is part of the Mediterranean)
to connect him to the ancient playwright Sophocles. In this passage the
sound of the rising and falling tide is used as an analogy for the "ebb and
flow of human misery" (line 17).
Line 21: This is one of the major, go-for-broke metaphors in "Dover
Beach." The speaker uses the idea of the sea that he's spent so much
time building up, but this time he turns it into a metaphor for the human
belief in a higher power. The real sea of the English Channel is
reimagined as a "Sea of Faith."

THE TIDE
Symbol Analysis
The image of the tide shows up repeatedly in this poem. The slow, steady,
endless movement of water, in and out, in and out, becomes a symbol of
eternity. It also, though, comes to represent change and loss. Let's turn to the
play-by-play.
Line 2: Here the tide is just the tide. It's part of the landscape at the
beginning of this poem. At the same time, the fact that our speaker
describes it as "full" contributes to the feeling of calm and happiness in
these first few lines.
Line 17: Here the "ebb and flow" of the tide is used as a metaphor for the
way that unhappiness rises and falls in human life. We think the rising
and falling of the tide makes for a kind of guiding rhythm all through this
poem.
Line 25: Here's another metaphorical tide, representing human faith. In
this case, though, it doesn't go in and out. It just rolls back forever,
deserting the world and leaving us confused and alone. Yay?

THE MOON
Symbol Analysis
The moon makes a couple of cameos at the beginning. Even though its role in
this poem is pretty brief, we think it's important. The opening parts of "Dover
Beach" are so much about the world that we see, and the moon is one of the
crucial features of that first scene. It helps to establish a feeling of calm that
will later be completely shattered.
Line 2: Here the moon is part of the happy natural imagery that opens
the poem. In this line the moon is described as being "fair" (lovely or
beautiful). If we only read this first stanza, we might think we were
dealing with a simple little nature poem, or a happy sonnet, perhaps. Our
speaker has bigger and darker plans than that, though.
Line 8: The world is still pretty much okay when the moon shows up here.
Still, we think there are little hints that not everything is just great.
There's something just a little bit sinister about the sound of the land
being "moon-blanched." It makes us think of something being unnaturally
pale, maybe even a little deathlike.

NIGHT
Symbol Analysis
The night has a few different roles to play in this poem. In a way, it's kind of a
flexible image. At first, it connects with the feelings of comfort and calm that
dominate the opening scenes of the poem. By the end, though, it's part of a
much more sinister set of ideas, connected metaphorically with all of the pain
and suffering of humanity.
 Line 6: In this line, nighttime sounds pretty great. The speaker even goes
so far as to describe the air as "sweet" a figure of speech that fits in
beautifully with the relaxed ambiance of these opening lines.
Line 27: By this point in the poem, the night has become a symbol not of
peace and happiness but of desolation and fear. The night-wind (in
comparison with the night-air in line 6) sounds kind of evil and
threatening to us. Rather than caressing the speaker, it howls around a
lonely and vulnerable world.
Line 37: It's no accident that "night" is the final word in this poem. With
an ending like that, Arnold leaves us in darkness, abandoned in the
confusion of the faithless world. While night doesn't always have to
symbolize emotional darkness, it sure does here.

NAKED SHINGLES
Symbol Analysis
This is such a pure and utterly bleak image that we think it deserves special
attention. The speaker of this poem has a bunch of different ways of describing
the desolation of the modern world. For our money, this is one of the best
moments, one of the strongest expressions of that feeling of hopeless
emptiness and vulnerability.
Line 28: In this line "shingles" means the rocks that lie on the shore. So
what Arnold is doing is picking up the imagery of the coastline that he
worked so hard to establish in the first stanza and turning it into
something evil-sounding and scary. The coast the speaker can see is calm
and comforting. The naked, empty metaphorical coast in his mind is
anything but.

DARKLING PLAIN
Symbol Analysis
This is the imaginary landscape where the great final simile of the poem comes
to its catastrophic end. Just think about how far we've come in such a short
poem, how far we are from the pleasure and calm of the beginning. We think
there's something totally spine-chilling about the image of this pitch-dark
battlefield.
Line 35: The image of the "darkling plain" opens up the
epic simile (notice how he says "as on a darkling plain") that ends the
poem. The basic idea here is that the speaker is comparing human
existence to a dark battlefield, where friends and enemies clash together
and fight each other in total confusion.
ANALYSIS: FORM AND METER
Irregular Iambic Pentameter and Complex, Variable
Rhymes
Matthew Arnold is experimenting with some of the conventions of traditional
poetry. Sure, it's not a real crazy experiment, but the freedom he takes with
form, meter, and rhyme can still give us a lot of insight into the poem's
meaning. Think of it like remodeling an old house rather than tearing it down.
We can still see the traces of old techniques, like iambic rhythm and rhyming
lines, but they've been loosened up and reimagined.
So how does this actually work in the poem? Well, let's start with the
poem's rhythm. The basic meter of this poem is iambic. An iamb is a group of
two syllables where the second syllable is stressed or emphasized, and the first
is not. For example, the word "return" in line 11 is iambic. Hear that? Return
daDUM. Iambic meter just repeats that daDUM pattern over and over. Some
lines in this poem are in consistent iambic meter. Others, not so much. Let's
look quickly at two examples. Lines 34-35 are in perfect iambic pentameter:
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
See? daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM. That's just like the meter
Shakespeare was writing 250 years before. But then look a couple of lines down
at line 36:
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
At first, the meter is trochaic (that's just reverse iambic: DUMda). Then, on the
word "alarms," the rhythm stumbles, and the rest of the line breaks the
trochaic pattern. In other words, the line itself starts to "struggle" The chaos
that Arnold is describing in the world shows up in his poem, too.
That's the payoff for this experimentation. Breaking the iambic traditions
passed down from Shakespeare and Milton helps him to make us feel how the
world itself is changed and broken. Pretty cool, huh?

Rhyme, No Reason
We get more or less the same effect with the rhyme. There's a ton of rhyme in
this poem, but it doesn't follow a regular pattern from one stanza to the next.
Let's look first at the second stanza (we'll put the rhyming sounds in bold and
match them up using capital letters).
Sophocles long ago (A)
Heard it on the gean, and it brought (B)
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow (A)
Of human misery; we (C)
Find also in the sound a thought, (B)
Hearing it by this distant northern sea. (C)
So in this stanza the rhyme scheme is ABACBC. Every line has a rhyming
partner Now let's look at the next stanza:
The Sea of Faith (A)
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore (B)
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. (C)
But now I only hear (D)
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, (B)
Retreating, to the breath (A?)
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear (D)
And naked shingles of the world. (C)
See how different the rhyme pattern is? In addition, take a look at the pair
marked with "A" and "A?" As we've seen in the stanza above, Arnold is capable
of making perfect rhymes. But here he chooses not to. The match between
"Faith" and "breath" is close at besta kind of near rhyme. Again, this choice of
form fits naturally with Arnold's larger point in this poem. In this dark new
world, faith is out of place, it has no natural partner. Just like with the meter, he
needs a new kind of poetic form to represent this new experience.

ANALYSIS: SPEAKER
We'll be the first to admit that we don't have some basic facts about this
speaker. We don't even have a name or a gender for this dude. (For the sake of
convenience in cases like this, we use the same gender for the speaker and the
poet, although it's important to remember that they aren't the same person.)
We don't know how old he is, or what he looks like.
So what do we know? Well, we know that he's standing in a room in Dover,
England with his lover, and listening to the ocean. He's also educated enough
to be able to drop a quick allusion to Socrates.

The Devil's in the (Lack of) Details

Still, that sounds like a lot of missing pieces to Shmoop. But that might just be
the point. "Dover Beach" isn't really about superficial details like names, hair
color, age, or background. It's a whole lot more universal than that. We don't
want to blow this too far out of proportion or anything, but here goes: we think
this speaker wants us to know how he understands The Entire World. And we
think, in 37 lines, he does a pretty good job.
He shows us that he has a deeply bleak view of the present state of mankind,
with little faith that human happiness can survive against the chaotic darkness
of life. He believes that the world "Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light."
He's nostalgic for a time when there was more faith in the world, and he tells
us that "The Sea of Faith / was once at the full" (21-22) but it's hard to even tell
when that was. He holds out some hope for love (29-30) but that doesn't look
good. When it comes down to it, we might say this speaker sounds a little
depressed. But we also think he should cheer up. After all, there's still poetry to
read. And love to fall in.
ANALYSIS: SETTING
Where It All Goes Down
Seems like we're golden on this one, since the setting of the poem is in the
title. This poem is set at the beach in Dover, on the southeastern coast of
England. Our work here is done, right?
Ah, not so fast, Shmoopers. In the first stanza, we get some more detail about
the scene. First, the speaker lets us know that the ocean is "calm" (1). He also
tells us that it's high tide (2) and the there's a moon lighting up the water (2-3).
He's also with someone else, whom he asks to "come to the window" (which
lets us know that he's not alone, and he's indoors). The speaker can hear the
sound of the waves crashing on the shore, and see a light "on the French
coast." From there, we take off into historical and metaphorical worlds inside
the poet's mind. Still we come back, in the final stanza (29-33), to the speaker
and his "love" (29) and his room on the English Channel.
We know for sure that Arnold himself went to Dover, and some critics have
suggested that this poem is based on his experiences on his honeymoon. From
what we can gather, it sounds like that's not quite settled, though. For more on
that check out Victorian Web.

ANALYSIS: SOUND CHECK

There's a fight in this poem between light and dark, harmony and chaos (kind
of makes it sound like Star Wars doesn't it?). That fight doesn't just happen on
the level of ideas and grand concepts though. We hear it in the sound of the
words, too.
In the first couple of stanzas, we hear the smooth, calm rhythm of the waves,
washing in and out, soothing us with soft sounds. Take line two for example:
"The tide is full, the moon lies fair." Two matching, balanced phrases, in perfect
iambic meter: daDUM daDUM, daDUM daDUM. The sound of the words "full"
and "fair" is as relaxed as the meter and the imagery.

Shaking Things Up
Then, slowly, new sounds start to creep in. The word "grating" in line 9 is
maybe the first sign of trouble. There's nothing happy or calming about a
grating sound, and it breaks into the easy tidal rhythm of the first few lines. It's
one of those words that sounds a little like the sound it's describing (the fancy
word for that is onomatopoeia). This trend picks up speed in the rest of the
poem, as we get more lines with broken, strange meter and harsh-sounding
words, like "naked shingles" (28).
Finally, in the last lines, as the chaos of the world takes over, that chaos seeps
into the sound of the poem as well. The rhythm of the waves has been taken
over by the harsh clanging sounds and disrupted rhythm of battle and fear.
Take the last line, for example: "Where ignorant armies clash by night" (37).
The words and the sounds are harsh, and the iambic meter is gone. Words like
"ignorant" and "clash" attack our ears, and the poem's transition to chaos is
complete.

ANALYSIS: WHAT'S UP WITH THE TITLE?

Well, to start with, the title, "Dover Beach," tells us where this poem takes
place. Or maybe it tells us where this poem takes off from, since it eventually
launches into other worlds of time, space, and imagination.
But that starting place matters. The sight of the beach at Dover and the sound
of the pounding waves inspire the speaker's wide-ranging thoughts. Putting the
name of the place at the top of the poem is a way to underline its importance.
It's probably also worth mentioning that the cliffs of Dover are hugely symbolic
for the English. They represent the English nation, and they were a familiar
sight for travelers coming and going to Europe. We're willing to bet most
English readers of this poem would get a mental image of Dover, a kind of
anchor in the world of the poem, just by reading the title. That gives Arnold a
boost when he's laying in those crucial visual images at the start of the poem
it makes it even easier us to put ourselves where the speaker is.

ANALYSIS: CALLING CARD

Serious, Lyrical Poems with a Dark Outlook
Matthew Arnold was (and is) well known not just as a poet, but as a literary
critic. So it stands to reason that he takes poems, and their power, Very
Seriously. The reference to Sophocles in "Dover Beach" also shows the
fingerprints of a guy who cared a lot about education and classical learning.
Still, we think what really marks this as a Matthew Arnold poem though is that
dark undertone. We see that "eternal note of sadness" (14) in a lot of his
poems. Not that he wasn't capable of appreciating beautywe see that all over
the place in this poem, too. But the general turn toward sadness and loss is a
major feature of a lot of Arnold's poetry and of his outlook on the modern
world.

ANALYSIS: TOUGH-O-METER
(4) Base Camp
There are a few tricky images in this poem (like that bit about the "bright
girdle" in line 23). Once you're over those, though, this should be an easy
climb. Take it slowsentence by sentence.
DOVER BEACH THEME OF MAN AND
THE NATURAL WORLD
"Dover Beach" is practically overflowing with deep philosophical thoughts, but
they are all launched by and rooted in the natural world that the speaker sees
all around him. As the speaker pays attention to the sights and sounds of a
moonlight night by the ocean, he can't help but ponder Big Ideas about our
world's history and its future. Bummer alert. The speaker of "Dover Beach"
argues that all of the beauty of the natural world is an illusion, distracting us
from the essential misery of being alive.
While the speaker's conclusions about life are increasingly grim, the beauty of
the scenery he describes balances out the darkness of his thoughts. So, you
know, life could be worse.

DOVER BEACH THEME OF SADNESS

Okay. "Dover Beach" isn't a total bummer. There are definitely moments of love
and beauty and pleasure mixed in there, too. But Sadness with a capital S is
threaded through everything, and it really builds at the end. We won't
sugarcoat it for you: this poem has a pretty grim view of the world. On the
other hand, Arnold does an amazing job of making that sadness memorable
and moving, too. Sadness, as the speaker suggests in line 14, is just one note
in this poem, part of a symphony of connecting and conflicting feelings about
the world and human life.
"Dover Beach" attempts to force its readers to acknowledge that sadness is the
only eternal and immovable aspect of human experience.

DOVER BEACH THEME OF SUFFERING

"Dover Beach" doesn't give you a pretty Disney-fied view of life (although
maybe that's not fair to Disneywe're still a little freaked out by the beginning
of Bambi). The speaker confronts the pain and suffering in the world head-on,
no holds barred. While the world might seem nice to look at sometimes (like on
a moonlit night), it's really just an endless and confusing wilderness of pain.
The only real antidote to suffering that the poem offers is love, and more
specifically, the faithfulness of one person to another. That's all we got in this
mad, mad world, Shmoopers.
Suffering is a powerful and inevitable force in "Dover Beach," and it lurks under
everything that seems beautiful and lasting, slowly eating it away. Hey, no one
said this poem is uplifting.

DOVER BEACH THEME OF SPIRITUALITY

Maybe "Dover Beach" isn't so much about spirituality as it is about the feeling
of losing it. The speaker looks back longingly to a time when people were more
spiritual, when they had more faith in divine guidance. Now that's mostly gone,
and the absence of faith has left the world "naked," vulnerable, and miserable.
Maybe life has always been hard, but according to our speaker we're now more
unprotected from that hardship than we've ever been. While the ocean might
rise and fall in an endless cycle, the poem gives us no hope that human
spirituality might return to its previous high tide. Faith is gone forever, and
that's all there is to it.
While faith may be gone, the speaker hints that love, and the ability of one
person to be "true" to another, could take its place. So hey, maybe there's a
silver lining yet.

DOVER BEACH THEME OF LIFE,

CONSCIOUSNESS, AND EXISTENCE
Matthew Arnold's strategy for "Dover Beach" is something like "go big or go
home." He doesn't restrict himself to little issues, or a moment in time, or
fleeting feelings. No, he deals with the Big Stuff, like History and Faith and the
True Nature of the World. In just 37 lines he zooms out so far that he's looking
out over all of human existence. Sure, the view he sees is pretty dark, but we
think there's something exciting about how grand and philosophical this poem
manages to be in such a small space. The beauty of the language in "Dover
Beach" works against its main premise, that life is fundamentally lightless and
joyless. Even if the subject is grim, the poem itself emphasizes the
fundamental hopefulness of existence. Take that, despair.
While the speaker condemns the world for its misery and absence of faith, he
does not extend those conclusions to himself. In essence, he manages to
separate himself from the rest of humanity.