Matthew Arnold’s "Dover Beach": The Forces Of Nature

Matthew Arnold was an English Victorian poet and literary and social critic, noted especially for his classical attacks on the contemporary tastes and manners of the “Barbarians” (the aristocracy), the “Philistines” (the commercial middle class), and the “Populace. ” He became the apostle of “culture” in such works as Culture and Anarchy.

Matthew Arnold’s modernist poem ‘Dover Beach’ uses the ocean purely as a metaphor to symbolically reflect his personal internal conflict and varying themes of melancholy. He does this through a wide range of literary devices; enjambment, assonance, similes, anaphora and alliteration. The use of enjambment, or the continuation of a stanza without pause, compels the idea of a patterned movement of tides, rising and falling along the shore. Assonance, further indulges the sound of despair with the rhyming of three stressed vowels at different parts throughout the poem (e. g. melancholy, long, roar).

Similies are used twice in Dover Beach, both used in trepidation: Line 23. ‘Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled’ Line 31. ‘To lie before us like a land of dreams’. Matthew Arnold’s use of anaphora emphasises the word ‘Nor’ in decree of the lack of positivity in his frame of mind whilst in this deep emotional pandemonium.

“Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain” – Poetry Foundation (2018).

One of the key principles of Romanticism is the admiration and respect for nature to a spiritual degree, and themes can include the personification of nature, but regardless of the emotional or enlightening conceptualisation a romanticist poet would choose to compose, nature would always be cast in praise and reverence. Arnold’s use of the symbolism of nature is emotionally charged, however it differs greatly to from a Romanticist poem, with the most prominent feature being the ocean only serving as an analogy to conduit the pessimistic inner turmoil of the poet.

Unlike a romanticist poem, there is no question to whether Matthew’s own emotion is purely personal experience, but one that many may share at a point in life, he does not stipulate his own view as a challenge to societal views, and he does not critically evaluate these ingrained ideologies, he simply pronounces his torn evaluations and pessimistically muses in his confusion. The ocean does not impact the Matthew himself, the poem is comprised of visual descriptive imagery critical to the significance of the poem; this reflection is not praising Dover Beach, but finding a pattern between reflection and harmony to display, in reference to Sophocles, "the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery”.