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Matthew ArnoldDover Beach
Matthew ArnoldFiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1867A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
With its vivid description of nature and sensuous attention to sonic detail, a reader could be forgiven for mistaking the first stanza of “Dover Beach” for the opening of a Romantic poem instead of a Victorian poem. Two things, however, mark this opening as Victorian, not Romantic. First, in Romantic poetry, nature typically inspires joy, awe, and a sense of the sublime, but in “Dover Beach” the waves outside the speaker’s window only make him sad. Second, the Romantic poets believed in organic forms, so they wanted the content of the poem to suggest the form, not the other way around. The form of “Dover Beach” is suggestive of the waves the poem describes, but the rhymes and the meter are also disorderly, and suggestive of the chaos the speaker sees in the world. Romantic poets tended to favor fixed rhyme-schemes and fixed meters, thus their poems were more orderly than “Dover Beach.”
Victorian poets, however, were more experimental with forms than their Romantic predecessors—for example, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote an elegy in fragments and Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote a novel in verse. “Dover Beach” is experimenting with a freer verse than the poetry that came before. First, there are the haphazard rhymes of the first three stanzas: abacdbdcefcgfg hihjij kelmeomn. The chaos of these rhymes fits with the content of the poem, which is all about the psychic chaos left behind when faith retreats from the modern world. Second, there is the meter of the poem. Overall, the meter is iambic, but this overall pattern does vary in quite a few places. Also, the line lengths vary quite a bit. The first line is three iambs long, the second four iambs long, the third five; and metrical variations like this persist throughout the poem. (For more on the meter of the poem, see the Literary Devices section.) Like the haphazard rhymes, the irregularity of the meter and line lengths in “Dover Beach” underscores the psychic confusion and chaos the poem describes.
Victorian poets witnessed rapid industrialization. They also grappled with scientific advancements that challenged religious faith, including Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. “Dover Beach” responds to huge societal change with a form that is “shaken up” both in form and content.
Geo-Historical Context
As well as its more obvious connections to the Victorian era, “Dover Beach” is often discussed as a Modernist poem; or, at the very least, a poem that presages the concerns of the Modernist movement. Many scholars and critics believe WWI was the single most defining event of the Modernist movement; and, in particular, it is WWI that “Dover Beach” seems to anticipate. The final lines of “Dover Beach” depict armies in a “confused” and “ignorant” fight: “And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night” (Lines 35-37).
These lines were written decades before WWI broke out; at the time “Dover Beach” was published, the “ignorant armies” (Line 37) in the poem’s final line were most likely read as metaphorical. After WWI broke out, however, solider-poets who fought in the trenches (including Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves) wrote verse that depicted the war as confused, ignorant, and purposeless. As a result, critics realized that the final image in “Dover Beach” could also be read literally.
Perhaps Arnold was just creating a metaphor for the confusion and struggle inherent once agrarian rhythms no longer order day-to-day existence and religious faith no longer orients people psychically. Or perhaps he had a premonition that the rapid industrialization he witnessed in the Victorian era meant larger, deadlier machines would eventually be used in war, and mechanized warfare would lead to mass death, which is exactly what happened in WWI.
Moreover, the beginning of the poem is also suggestive of wartime. Dover Beach was a famous site of invasion and defense. The Dover cliffs are right where the channel is narrowest. Dover is the closest point in England to France and the European continent, making it a natural place for an invading army to attack. The fact that the cliffs are so tall, however, gives British people stationed at the top of the cliffs a tactical advantage (“White Cliffs of Dover.” Dover Museum). So, as well as summer holidays, the setting of the poem brings to mind military skirmishes. The poem opens with a view that could be from a fleet of boats invading, or from a tower defending:
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 (Lines 1-5).
It isn’t until Line 6, when the speaker says, “Come to the window, sweet is the night air!” that readers realize the viewers of this scene are likely lovers, not soldiers. Many of the most famous Modernist works, including T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, can be interpreted as responding to WWI, and Arnold’s “Dover Beach” can be interpreted as anticipating WWI. This connects his poem thematically and stylistically to the Modernist movement.
Finally, Modernist poets were skeptical of traditional forms. In their mind, the traditional social orders had been upended, and that meant traditional forms needed to be done away with, too. As a result, Modernist poets like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein wrote free verse poems and eschewed traditional forms. “Dover Beach” is not quite as free as Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” but it is significantly freer than other poems of its time. Arnold’s poem can be read as an early progenitor of the free verse that would become very common during the Modernist movement.
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