“Dover Beach” is a four stanza poem written by Matthew Arnold that starts out with a quiet scene. It begins with the speaker looking out on the moonlit water and listening to the sound of the waves. The author describes that the night air is “sweet” as he stands on the pebbled shore looking out at the “calm” sea. However, he says the sound of the waves create a sad noise. The speaker is reminded of a time he was in Greece, and the sound of the waves takes him on a mental journey back there. The second stanza is about this allusion. He imagines if Sophocles heard the same sound as he stood next to the sea. This allusion creates a connection between Sophocles and the speaker. In the third stanza, the speaker drives the ocean as a metaphor to religion. He refers to an earlier time when religion was more important in people’s lives. He says that people used to have faith “full” and “round.” The speaker says that people used to have faith, but just as the tide was going down, so is the faith of people. The last stanza takes a pretty big shift. The tone becomes even more sad. The speaker brings up the idea that maybe if the world has lost its faith, it can hold onto some of it. However it’s the world he hears in the crashing waves. The world is nothing but chaos, and there is no joy left. Meaningless wars are taking place, and the speaker realizes he has lost his faith in the world. Though the poem started out peacefully, the poem ends with the speaker losing hope in the world, which has turned to ugliness and chaos. Arnold starts out his poem describing the beautiful sea and surrounding scene. He expresses his uncertainty about nature, and the mood of the poem quickly changes in a negative way. Throughout the rest of the poem, he describes the landscape in a depressing way. In the poem “Dover Beach”, Matthew Arnold creates a lonely, disheartening tone by making use of imagery, simile, and personification. Using these elements, he portrays a man standing on the beach afraid of what the world has become.
Arnold makes great use of imagery to almost spellbound the reader in this poem. He immediately captures the readers’ senses in the beginning of the poem, “The sea is calm tonight. / The tide is full, the moon lies fair”. The first stanza is filled with detail of the landscape of where the character in the poem is standing. The straightforward description given in the first stanza makes the reader picture the natural beauty depicted by the author. However the author uses imagery in the rest of the poem to portray the sadness and loneliness of the character. In the last stanza, the author writes that the world “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain'. Then the poem ends with its strongest lonely image of a “darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.” The imagery used here is to show the reader that the people of the world aren’t anything like the beauty of the world. This same analysis of the use of imagery was shared by Nicholas Salerno in his article “Shakespeare and Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’”, where he acknowledges Arnold’s use of imagery to make the reader feel the darkness the speaker was feeling. The world has a beautiful visual appeal, but the people on it don’t have any joy nor light. The speaker feels as if he is the only light, and his loneliness is felt by the reader because of the imagery used throughout the poem.
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Arnold also uses simile and personification to further drive the tone of the poem. He uses these elements to compare the sea to human sorrow and also human faith. He writes that human faith “Was once, too, at the full,” and using simile he continues: “like the folds of a bright girdle”. This could also be considered personification since a girdle is something a human would wear. Mary Midgley shared this analysis in her article “Dover Beach: Understanding the Pains of Bereavement.” Her article was a great analysis of the theme of lost faith in the poem. The speaker in the poem has lost hope in the people of the world, and feels saddened by the way people lost faith. Using these literary elements, the reader can feel the emotions of the character and a lonely tone is represented.
I like this poem because I felt like I was there in the poem. The imagery and abundance of detail used by Arnold made me feel as if I was standing on the beach with the speaker. The poem had so much meaning and I felt as if I was connected to it somehow. Analyzing this poem made me appreciate poetry more and I actually enjoyed doing it.
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