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| Matthew Arnold |
A Critical Appreciation of the
lyrical poem Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold. It begins by
highlighting the bright beautiful aspects that life can bring when he has a
couple together looking out at the ocean which in this poem is an extended
metaphor the speaker begins to realize that life is full of sadness when he
reflects upon the world that came before him and how that led to the
hopelessness and misery that surrounds them in the present day. He concludes by
saying that they need to try to remain faithful to one another even though they
exist in a world that is like a battlefield, a place where hopelessness exists
with only the slightest bit of happiness. Dover beach was
written by Matthew Arnold during the Victorian time period on our literary timeline and Arnold
wrote this around the time that England was colonizing all over the world
leaving him on the brink between the old world and the new and in our poem
Dover Beach that is very clearly present that he was having a hard time dealing
with this change and this style of poetry was the lyric style poetry and just
the way that this poem was written. It really does demonstrate the struggles
and changes Arnold was experiencing in his own life. There is an
extended metaphor that the sea is just like our life the light which is brought
up represents faith and as we see in the third and fourth lines light gleams
and is gone showing that faith can be there one moment book on the next there's
also an ongoing theme of night and darkness representing the loss of light or
faith in a world. The pebbles in the sea represent the eternal note of sadness
because they are constantly being rolled to and fro from the shore.
The tone of the first stanza
is tranquil because of the calm metaphor of the sea going back and forth just
like our life so now we can analyze stanza 2 which is Sophocles long ago heard
it on the Aegean and it brought into his mind the turbid egg and flow of human
misery we find also in the sound of thought hearing it by this distant northern
sea so it begins with an allusion to Sophocles who was best known as being a
great human thinker and here he's referenced to thinking just about humanity in
general and it's just about how awful it really is. The line 31 says the
turbid ab and flow it means he's thinking about the muddy and murky and very
unclear parts that we have in just in life in general and ebb and flow usually
is associated with coming and going so it's just the great coming and goings of
life that we have and we when he says we in that fourth line he's not just
talking about himself that's showing how he's including everyone how no one is
free from the misery that is life everyone goes through it no one can escape it
and then he says in line for find also in the sound a thought which is ironic
because you can't hear thoughts but he's saying that thoughts they're just so
loud and they can be so distant but yet you can still hear them and it's also
all just connecting it's showing how connected the past is to the present how
life is still the same as it was hundreds of years ago despite all the
differences there really are still the same.When you get down to the end of it
and this stanza it also is the beginning of a shift that we found and you can
tell us the shift because the first stanza that is when the speaker is in the
present and he's talking to and then he's talking to his lover about the past
so it's a shift from present to past which is pretty significant in this poem
so now stands a three the faith was once - at the full and round earth Shore
lay like the folds of a bright girdle world but now I only hear its melancholy
long withdrawing roar we're treating to the breath of the night wind down the
vast edges dreary and naked shingles of the world so the first line the sea of
faith that's a metaphor for an ocean of religious belief and the next line it
says that that ocean it was full and round so it's saying religion used to be
big and important in our world because it lay like the folds of a bright girdle
world so that simile means that that ocean or that big pile of religious belief
it used to be happy and full of potential but in that but is important because
it's almost no showing a change in this poem and showing how the world was
happy before but now it really isn't that happy anymore because now he's
saying that he only hears it's melancholy long withdrawing more which is saying
that the sea has lost all happiness and it's just stuck in deep sadness and
that is just that symbolizes the world's loss of faith which helps contribute
to the misery that is left in the world and retreating to the breath of the
night wind that is a deep contrast to something earlier in the poem when in the
first and it said sweet is the night air because I was saying that I was happy
and nice but now this breath of not the night wind it's making.
It sounds very hopeless and
alone and it just very bad and then down the best addressed rear naked shingles
of the world that diction choice air of the word naked is very important
because that symbolizes just hopelessness and someone who's just afraid and
alone and scared so the world is just full of unhappy things people have lost
their religion they don't they don't longer know what to believe in anymore in
this stanza really is full of just a more darker language than most of the
other ones even though it does start out a little happier of 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 has really neither joy nor love nor light nor
certitude nor peace or help for pain and we're here as on a Darkling plain
swept with confused alarms of struggling and flight we're ignorant armies
clashed by night after the final shift of the poem.
We are back into the present
time where the speaker is talking with his love he uses a simile in line three
calling the earth like a land of dreams this says that the world is only truly
happy and dreams not in real life and tells us people's false perceptions of
the world there's it that it is so beautiful and new that gives us the reality
that the world really doesn't have joy love light or certitude or peace this is
how the reader knows that the speaker now truly sees the world realistically he
again repeats the ongoing theme of darkness calling the world a Darkling plain
to finish the poem off he calls the world a battlefield full of confusion and
ignorance in the darkness. The tone has completely changed from what started as
tranquil to now being grim and dark so we put the theme of Dover Beach as life
is grim and hopeless despite moments of light and happiness and then the next
thing we did was develop that theme into an essay based on the prompt how does
the author reinforce meaning through his use of figurative language tone
structure and other literary features this is what we thought could possibly be
used to organize an essay on Dover Beach. We organize the essay based on the
shifts in the poem which is seen in our thesis and three topic sentences our
thesis says Matthew Arnold uses a variety of literary devices to show how life
is grim and hopeless despite moments of light and happiness our first topic
sentences the poem begins with a happy couple on a beach. One starts to realize
that life is made up of brief moments of joy but prolonged periods of sadness
then after the poems first shift, our second topic sentence says the tone
shifts from one of tranquility to one of blank were the speaker begins to
reflect on life in the misery of past generations and finally after our poems
last shift our topic sentence says the poem returns to the present as the
speaker realizes that life's miseries will be around eternally making him want
to treasure the precious time he has with his love.
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