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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-blanch'd 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 {AE}gean, 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
Read poems about / on: sea, moon, faith, beach, night, beautiful, peace, light, joy, world, wind, pain, dream
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Click here to write your comments about this poem (Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold)
Saiom Shriver (6/14/2008 8:27:00 PM)
My father loved this poem so much that my torch was ignited
by his reverence |
Michael Pruchnicki (4/26/2008 10:07:00 AM)
'Dover Beach' by Matthew Arnold is not a descriptive poem about
a particular stretch of sand where on moonlit nights, an observer
might see the distant lights of the far shores of France. All the
earlier comments have focused on that aspect of Arnold's four
stanza poem.
The first stanza stresses the roar of the sea as it recedes from
the beach, which introduces the eternal note of sadness. A far
cry from 'The sea is calm tonight, ' which is an illusion, a dream
of something not true in reality!
Second stanza recalls the great Greek tragic dramatist Sophocles
on the shores of the sunny Aegean, whose plays explore that
illusion and the reality that human life is an ebb and flow of misery.
The Sea of Faith (rise of Christian belief) was once truly catholic,
a universal faith in redemption held throughout western Europe.
But in Arnold's day, that belief has been eroded and is receding.
The final stanza is an apostrophe to a lover, a caution to wake up
from the illusion of the land of dreams and realize the struggles
between the ignorant armies of the night that confuse and alarm
us as we strive to see with clarity the world as it is! |
Read all 6 comments >>
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Matthew Arnold
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