Summary Of The Poem Dover Beach By Mathew Arnold
In the beginning of the poem, “Dover Beach”, Mathew Arnold starts with the line “The sea is calm tonight”. This is a simple but strong affirmation and it can give us some information about the poem. He is giving significance to the sea and how it will play as an important image for the rest of the poem. The first stanza of the poem can show how sometimes the sea can be calm. He used words like “tranquility', and “glimmering” to describe how the sea looks. Then it starts to transition into more noisy and busier areas of the sea. At line 8-10 he says “Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, Listen! You hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling”. This is showing imagery of a beach at night, and we see this like its nothing but Matthew does a fantastic job of making it sounds like we are caught in a huge wave and are at the authority of the wave.
The second stanza starts with a feel of melancholy. Mathew made an allusion to Sophocles, which brings some historical outlook to the poem. When he mentions the tide, you can see that it is a metaphor for human misery. The tide goes in and out brining hardships, and some new found beauty encompassed in human life. Tides go in and out and wait for nothing or no one, just doing the cycle of in and out like it always does.
Stanza three presents religion into the story. It seems like the world’s faith is low, and can be shown as a low tide when it’s on its way out, where there was once water that covered that part of the beach. With some quick research done on Mathew it can be known that he was aware of the new changes in technology when he was alive. People were starting to denounce their faith in God’s, so there were less and less spiritual followers.
At the beginning of the fourth stanza it becomes clear that the companion who is looking out over the water with the speaker is most likely a lover or romantic partner. It feels like in this paragraph he starts to talk to that person directly, saying that they should remain true to one another in this “land of dreams.” The world has changed in a different way for the speaker, in more like a dream than the harsh reality he is used to. The poem concludes with a negative outlook of the state of the Earth. There are people suffering and trying to fight back but are confused about what they are fighting for, and faith is starting to go away.
