Analysis of Dover Beach by Sara Blum

Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold, 1867

The sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straights; — 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 crease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegaean, 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 furl’d.

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.

Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach is a poem mournful and somber in tone, almost like that of an elegy[1], but with the personal nature of a dramatic monologue. The poem begins with naturalistic metaphors full of sound, describing the beach at Dover in the moonlight: “Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,/Listen! You hear the grating roar.” The beach is empty and lonely, with only a hint of a light that “gleams and is gone.” The seashore at night painted by Arnold in this poem is a dark, melancholy scene, giving the poem a smooth but brooding tone.

The remarkable thing about this poem is that each formal function of it consistently identifies with sea. Arnold’s words roll slowly into each other, like waves breaking on a sleepy shore. The third stanza employs a series of open vowels—“Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”—creating a verbal flow and roll through assonance.

Even the shapes formed by the uneven lines in each of the four stanzas reflect the image of waves reaching and retreating on a shore. There are a variable number of syllables in each line, as well as an uneven amount of lines in each stanza; the first stanza has fourteen, the second six, the third eight, and the fourth nine. The meter is also rather unpredictable but seems to follow a general iambic pattern. With the irregular amount of syllables per each line (they range from 6 to 10), the meter won’t be pinned down as simply pentameter or tetrameter.

Not even the rhyme scheme of Dover Beach is consistent; the first stanza (abacdbdcefcgfg) is a jumble of rhymes that, at the moment they seem like a consistent pattern, jump into a new sound. The second stanza, considerably shorter than the first, is a little tighter in its scheme (abacbc), with its first four rhymes mimicking that of the first stanza (abac). The third stanza (abcdbadc), however, shows no coherency at all, its rhymes stretched over several lines. Finally, the fourth stanza (abbacddcc) seems to be toying with the idea of forming into a Petrarchan sonnet[2], but quickly changes its mind, coming to a stop as neither an octave[3] nor a sestet[4], but with qualities of both.

Arnold is also brilliant in his use of alliteration; it is neither too heavy nor too light, but naturally flows mimicking the open sea gently swelling. The sounds of this poem are smooth and watery, pushing against the irregularities of its form. In the first stanza Arnold uses the “g” and “l” sounds in “Gleams and is gone,” reviving the sound in the following line with “glimmering.” A few lines further down in that same stanza, he alliterates “l,” “s,” and “m” in “sweet is the night air! /Only, from the long line of spray/ Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, /Listen!”

In the fourth stanza Arnold writes in a list, underlining a series of denials: "…neither joy, nor love, nor light/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;" The repetition of “neither…nor” also seems to mimic the constant beat of waves washing onto a shore. Moreover, waves beating on the shoreline seem to be the only true constant in this poem, again pushing against the erratic rhymes and syllables. This “turbid ebb and flow” of the sea in the second stanza, however, also draws in the melancholic tone into the poem, reminding Arnold of Sophocles’ musings of “human misery.”

From the poem’s formal structure to its themes, the sea is the most prominent image and metaphor. In the first stanza, the sea “meets the moon-blanched land” and the waves “draw back and fling” the pebbles onto the shore, bringing the “eternal note of sadness in.” And in the third stanza, the sea becomes the “Sea of Faith” which “was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore /Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d. /But now I only hear /Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, /Retreating, to the breath…” This waning sea of faith suggests change for Arnold, possibly religious change; indeed, something that was once full is now emptying and retreating.