Another Victorian for today’s National
Poetry Month: Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”.
I love this poem; no—I mean I love it. You can smell the brine in the air and feel the spray on
your face and hair. The shingle crunches under your feet and the moon
silvers it all.
But it’s the injunction at the end that really gets
to me. After the melancholy, long withdrawing roar of faith, the concept of two
beings holding true to one another.
Damn.
Dover
Beach
The sea is calm
to-night.
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,
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 long ago
Heard it on the Aegean,
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.
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
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.
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