Dover Beach (Mathew Arnold)

Dover Beach is a characteristic ode written by Matthew Arnold. Arnold is an eminent poet of the Victorian school. The decay of religious faith and the spread of industrialism form the background of his poetry. He was dissatisfied with contemporary life. He saw himself as one who stood alone on a naked beach from which the tide of faith had ebbed. In his poems, he criticises contemporary life for its loss of faith. Arnold’s definition of poetry as “criticism of life” is amply fulfilled in his own poems. He did not consider poetry to be merely a decorative or ornamental thing. He regarded poetry as something higher, in which he could explain his philosophy of life, his deep appreciation of the problems of life. He presented criticism of the contemporary life in his poetry but his keen intellect, high seriousness, and wide learning did not help him much as a poet. Often, he wished to write poems that would illustrate his theories about poetry. Dover Beach is not an exception to this formula.

Dover Beach has been written in an elegiac strain. It has been aptly remarked that Arnold was “a classic, writing in a romantic age”, and the present poet is a testimony to this fact. The poet has painted here a scene which is full of romance and beauty. The sea near Dover has been flooded by white moonlight and is at its full tide. The shore of France is visible in the distance beyond the sea where a light gleams and is gone. The poet is looking at the scene and is inviting his beloved to witness it through the window. Then again, he is experiencing a sense of melancholy wistfulness at what he is seeing. He yearns for the sea of faith that once was full but is now sunk so low. After presenting an evocative description of the romantic atmosphere near the beach at Dover, Arnold depreciates the absence of christian values as a result of which men have abandoned the kindly life of the country with its ancient pieties for the feverish competition of manufacturing towns. Sophocles was an Athenian tragic poet and dramatist. He heard the “turbid ebb and flow of human misery” in the same way as Arnold. The reference to Sophocles shows Arnold’s classical scholarship and it is perfectly appropriate. Later Arnold centres his focus of attention on inconstancy and infidelity in love which is a typical Victorian theme.

The poet is in love with a woman named Marguerite. Of the several sorrowing lovers of his time, the poet is one but Marguerite, for whom the world is “so various so beautiful, so new”, is among the souls “charm’d at birth from groom and care”, happy in herself, asking no love and plighting no faith. And her indifference brings home to Arnold sharply and dramatically, what he believes to be emotional situation of the modern man-his insufficiency, his uncertainty, his dilution of spirit. At time he feels the indifference as a betrayal and a humiliation comparing his own constancy to her fickleness. But chiefly he realises that the warm, tender pathetic love of Dover Beach, the utterance of a need arising from despair, can mean nothing to one in whom the outgoing emotion which her lover mistook for love is merely the “bliss within”, an exuberance of spiritual poise.

Dover Beach is a remarkable achievement of Arnold. Though, Arnold reacted against romantic looseness of structure, yet he could not suppress his romantic feelings in this poem. The expression of the sense of mystery, the love of melancholy, the worship of natural objects, the yearning for a happier time and profound regret over the ugliness of contemporary life reveal Arnold’s romanticism. This poem lacks lyrical intensity. It is not spontaneous. It does not thrill us; it does not lift us out of ourselves. Its appeal is purely intellectual.

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