Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
“Dover Beach” (1867)
Reading Questions
- Who is the speaker? Where is the speaker?
- What does the progression from “calm” in the first line to “clash” in the final line suggest or reveal?
- Trace the speaker’s mood across the poem. How does it shift and develop? How do you know?
- What anxieties does “Dover Beach” address or reveal?
- What effect does the mention of Sophocles have?
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; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, 10
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles[1] long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea. 20
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
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.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems 30
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;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.[2]
- Sophocles: ancient Greek tragedian, author of Antigone and Oedipus Rex. ↵
- Generally understood to be a reference to the night battle of Epipolae as described by Thucydides in *History of the Peloponneisan War.* Arnold's father, Dr.Thomas Arnold, translated Thucydides, and in that translation, Dr. Arnold describes this moment: "They saw one another as men naturally would by moonlight; that is, to see before them the form of the object, but to mistrust their knowing who was friend and who was foe" (175). See also Walter H. Kokernot, " 'Where ignorant armies clash by night' and the Sikh Rebellion: A Contemporary Source for Matthew Arnold's Night-Battle Imagery," *Victorian Poetry* 43.1 (2005): 99-108. Essay linked in Bibliography. ↵