Toma Alexandra Monica

“Dover Beach”

- Matthew Arnold

~ Symbolism ~

Some consider Matthew Arnold to be the bridge between Romanticism and Modernism. His use of symbolic landscapes was typical of the Romantic era, while his skeptical and pessimistic perspective was typical of the Modern era.

Written in 1867, the poem “Dover Beach” is considered one of the early examples, sometimes even held up for the first feature of the modern sensibility. The surroundings used by the author are still romantic: the sea, the shore, the moon, the night’s air; but the feelings that overcome the lyrist have a modern touch within their quiet, untroubled echoes of the past and present, the future is somehow uncertain, caused by the day to day life: “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.”

The title is composed of Dover, a town and major ferry port in the home county of Kent, in South East England, and beach, situating the atmosphere in the nearest spot of the England coast to the continent. Regarding the fact that the poem is an appeal to the human condition in present conjured by the sound of time written in the pebbles, the waves and the water, I will choose to define the authors intentions within the construct of the symbolist manner, an approach guided by the connection of man with man and nature and the ether around.

“Dover Beach” represents not only a point of connection with the rest of Europe in a geographical way of view, but also with the past, bringing out of the mist of history the unity that surrounded men in its existence.

The first stanza builds up the contrast between the sea’s depths, unknown and always changing, in a calm mood and overwhelming as a human soul: “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”; and the solid ground, a fixed environment, a well defined point of reference, an anchor in the present, an analogy to the world’s civilizations over time: “the cliffs of England stand, / Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.”, very

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much dependable in their survival on their structure and the water’s influence. The last verse: “Come to the window, sweet is the night air!” is a calling to who might be listening to open their minds and eyes, seen as a window to the soul, and breath in the cleanest, purest energy, the thin air of the night described as sweet for its delight for every man.

In the second stanza are brought the auditive images of the waves and pebbles within the stillness of the visual images in the first stanza. This sensation can easily be associated with time, which passes and shall never be returned and changed. “Only, from the long line of spray / Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, / Listen!” defines the only place where this can be understood, at the point of convergence between the earth, sea, air, moon and light, or better said in the moment of ones full awareness of the life that surrounds him. The verb ‘Listen!’ is in the imperative form, rising the attention upon everything that can be detected, starting with the most evident one, quite hypnotizing in its movement and sound, inducing into a peaceful, tranquil atmosphere of the natural balance of the world’s movements: “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”. The second person is used in the personal pronoun ‘you’, but also in the verb ‘Listen!’, so that the reader would find it more easily to identify him/herself to the place depicted under his/her eyes in simple lyrics. For this thoroughness is important in the last verse: “and bring / The eternal note of sadness in.” where a great power of understanding is required to hear everything might want to share.

The same feeling is being described in the third stanza, under the hall-mark of the ancient Greek tragedian poet, Sophocles: “Sophocles long ago / Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought / Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery;”, to whom the surface of the Aegean Sea has brought the feelings of confusion and fogginess within the human mind to write down in his poems, so he might make a point. But as those sentiments have been kept all the way through these days, to our contemporaneous reach, making this the single reason for their miserable condition, it is no wander that the same roar can still be heard in the present in the Northern Sea, trying mans ability to adapt to nature’s demands, over and over again: “; we / Find also in the sound a thought, / Hearing it by this distant northern sea.”.

The first verse of the forth stanza contains the metaphor ‘Sea of Faith’ which refers to, as water usually does to the unconscious of man, a larger significant, in the present known as the collective unconscious. The next two lines refer to a previous state: “Was once, too, at the full and round earth's shore / Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.” when mankind had a different view of himself and the world. This was based on the senses, not on the belief in gods, making clear distinction between matter and spirit in a full conscious manner. The visual image to represent this is a girdle furled, which gives the impression of a balanced and calm state of the soul, in a bright white light. This makes a contrast with the continuance of the stanza in the present day: “But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, / Retreating”, in which the atmosphere becomes unsafe, unbalanced, with a heavy feeling of sadness, very much influenced by the earthly abundance of shapes and temptation: “to the breath / Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear / And naked shingles of the world.”

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The last stanza is a conclusion to the concept of life presented on a three leveled degradation across time in the second, third and forth stanzas. It’s like a solution to all the misery: the confidence in love and one another: “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!”. The reality is depicted as the beautiful place it is, but the humans living in it as the incapable being whom cannot find happiness, blaming the world for their bad habit of dreaming instead of acting and their disability to find the source of joy, love, light, certitude, peace and the help for pain: “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;”. Choosing fear over trust and an absolute confidence in the material life, but not in the feelings, nor intuition, we choose to restrict our world to the bellicose, dark, negative corner of it: “And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.”. Reality is what you make it.

I would like to end by returning to the idea that there are used three points of reference in the similitude made between the general opinion of the world and a particular one in the present, in the second stanza; antiquity, in the third; and an even far time, underline by the word ‘once’, in the forth one. All three have a deep carriage of symbolic meaning, the most important being the sea in different hypostasis, though maintain the same metaphor of the human soul. In the last is seen almost as an entity on its own, next has the image of a muse, trying to cure the human beings, and in the first as a part of nature that must be understand. Its degradation is seen in a downward direction, from the most distant past to the present day, forever changing, but never lost.

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Bibliography:- ..\Informatica\Matthew Arnold - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.htm

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