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Click here for an extended audio lecture of the discussion of Arnold's "Dover Beach."
"The sea is calm tonight," a haunting opening to the poem "Dover Beach" and the evocation of a slow, calm, melancholy sea, a full tide and the channel brightly illuminated by the moon.
It is one of those most English of poems, taking us to one of the many historic sites that helped define England as a nation.
Dover has long held an important place in English lore, representing the place at which England so nearly joins the continent of Europe but so often representing the place at which it most certainly does not; accordingly, it is a location that is heavily fortified and steeped in a naval tradition and strategic significance that spans centuries.
It is hardly surprising then that Arnold offers us a scene of strife and symbolic conflict at a Dover Beach "where the sea meets the moon-blanched land [where] you hear the grating roar/Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling."
Arnold's poem takes advantage of Dover's symbolic significance and makes it a testing ground for more than just the sovereignty of a nation. The public domain, the patriotic, is there in this poem just as it would be in the Second World War anthem "White Cliffs of Dover," in the image of "ignorant armies clash[ing] by night;" but, significantly, the poem is also private, or personal.
In the personal sphere of the poem we are listening on one level to the anguished voice of inner conflict. Faith appears to be under siege in the poem. What is there to believe in any more cries the melancholy narrator? But the poem is also, at its simplest, a love poem, urging a momentary union between the timeless traditional opposites the land and the sea, (two contrary lovers, each alone in the tumult and conflict of the broader world and their own passion).
The sea that struggles and raves is the British Channel itself, flinging itself vainly against the land, an almost stock image in English Literature that has a number of possible symbolic connotations.
The most familiar example of it elsewhere is John of Gaunt's famous: "sceptred isle" speech in Shakespeare's Richard II (see sound icon for a recording), but in Arnold's poem it is more; it is also the sea of "human misery" that the ancients talk about, and "the Sea of Faith," retreating from nineteenth century scientific rationalism (a kind of existential crisis that threatens the individual, alone, "here as on a darkling plain"). It is also the sea of love, hence the desperate appeal towards the end of the poem "ah love, let us be true / to one another! for the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams ... hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain."
Perhaps it is not so different in some ways from Marvellīs appeal for union, and hence meaning of some sort out of life?
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