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Dover Beach
The famous poem "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold.
154 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1867
About the author
Matthew Arnold
1,507 books187 followersPoems, such as "Dover Beach" (1867), of British critic Matthew Arnold express moral and religious doubts alongside his
Culture and Anarchy
, a polemic of 1869 against Victorian materialism.
Matthew Arnold, an English sage writer, worked as an inspector of schools. Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of rugby school, fathered him and and Tom Arnold, his brother and literary professor, alongside William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew...
Matthew Arnold, an English sage writer, worked as an inspector of schools. Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of rugby school, fathered him and and Tom Arnold, his brother and literary professor, alongside William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews
June 10, 2021
”My poems represent, on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary productions which reflect it. It might be fairly urged that I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning; yet because I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn as they have had theirs.”
- Matthew Arnold, in a letter to his MOTHER!
Reputation – 3/5
As a poet, Matthew Arnold has never had his day. By middle age he was devoting almost all his writing to literary criticism and it is literary criticism for which he is remembered today. Arnold was naturally more of a critic than a poet, but he lived during a time when it was not unusual for a man to decide he wanted to write poems and to publish them himself. We no longer live in that time, and a man who spends his time writing poetry, we view with at least a bit of a sidelong glance. But in the Victorian Era, amateurs still wrote poetry.
Point – 3/5
The critic John Cowper Powys once called Matthew Arnold “the great amateur” of English poetry. And indeed, there is something very amateurish about Arnold’s poetry. That is not to say that it is bad.
By critical overuse the word “amateur” has come to carry a negative connotation. It has come to mean something like “inept,” when the word itself literally means “one who loves” in the original French. As G.K. Chesterton wrote
“A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well.”
Matthew Arnold is exactly this kind of amateur. He nearly admits so much himself in the above-quoted letter to his mother. The letter is an almost unbelievably frank self-assessment, and it is precisely correct, excepting its last clause. Arnold’s poetry never had its day.
But that is not entirely his fault. It is true that he had a profounder understanding of the “main line of modern development” than any other poet of his time. Arnold knows that deep down, under the veneer of Victorian civilization, something is rotten. He doesn’t quite know what it is, but his pessimism is palpable.
”O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o’ertax’d, its palsied hearts, was rife —“
He is the first English poet to call his age diseased. The metaphor seems trite to us now, but Arnold wrote those lines in 1853. It comes from a poem called The Scholar Gipsy, which the critic in Arnold didn’t like. He wrote:
“Homer animates – Shakespeare animates, in its poor way I think Sohrab and Rustum (another of Arnold’s poems) animates – the ‘Gipsy Scholar’ at best awakens a pleasing melancholy. But this is not what we want.
The complaining millions of men
Darken in labour and pain–
what they want is something to animate and ennoble them – not merely to add zest to their melancholy or grace to their dreams.”
Other critics disagreed and called it one of his best poems.
And here we come to the fundamental discord in Matthew Arnold: as a critic, he does not believe in his own poetry.
When the critic in Arnold tries to write poetry, he writes long-winded attempts at philosophical poetry with far too many classical allusions. He tries too hard to show off his learning to the poetry-reading class, or perhaps he thinks that his immortality will be ensured by his communication with the canon. But all this is very tiresome, especially when we see what Matthew Arnold the natural poet is capable of.
The poet in Arnold has a great natural intuition for personal depth and profound meditation. In his best moments, he is very much like his hero, Wordsworth, only more pessimistic.
And I, I know not if to pray
Still to be what I am, or yield, and be
Like all the other men I see.
For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where in the sun’s hot eye,
With heads bent o’er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give,
Dreaming of naught beyond their prison wall.
And as, year after year,
Fresh products of their barren labour fall
From their tired hands, and rest
Never yet comes more near,
Gloom settles slowly down over their breast.
And while they try to stem
The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,
Death in their prison reaches them
Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.
And the rest, a few, Escape their prison, and depart
On the wide Ocean of Life anew.
There the freed prisoner, where’er his heart
Listeth, will sail;
Nor does he know how there prevail,
Despotic on life’s sea,
Trade-winds that cross it from eternity.
A while he holds some false way, undebarr’d
By thwarting signs, and braves
The freshening wind and blackening waves.
And then the tempest strikes him, and between
The lightning bursts is seen
Only a driving wreck,
And the pale Master on his spar-strewn deck
With anguish’d face and flying hair
Grasping the rudder hard,
Still bent to make some port he knows not where,
Still standing for some false impossible shore.
And sterner comes the roar
Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom
Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,
And he too disappears, and comes no more.
Is there no life, but these alone?
Madman or slave, must man be one?”
This is really good stuff. It gets right to the heart of “modern life” as Arnold identified it and as we end up living it. So why didn’t Arnold the poet have his day?
The first reason, it seems to me, is that while Arnold is indeed pessimistic, he never could have predicted how completely hopeless and nihilistic the world would become. He was, after all, born in 1822, grew up with an Eminently Victorian schoolmaster father, and died in 1888. He could not have imagined a Europe that would recklessly launch itself into the cultural suicide of the First World War. That was a turning point in the line of modern life that Arnold simply couldn’t have predicted. And the consequences of it tossed his age, with all its morals and poetic stylizing, forever into the dustbin of history. This is not Matthew Arnold’s fault.
The second reason actually is Arnold’s fault. And that is that Matthew Arnold the critic killed Matthew Arnold the poet. The man who began as an amateur in the French sense of the word ("a lover”) ended up condemning himself as an amateur in its modern sense (“a tepid dabbler”).
To return to the letter that he wrote his mother, it seems he came to believe that his poems would never have their day, and that he would be better off just not writing them.
Recommendation – 4/5
It may seem strange to try to revive Matthew Arnold as poet, but I think, he does deserve his day after all. He will never have his day in the same sense that Tennyson or Browning had theirs, but he was absolutely correct in saying that his poetry addressed something that those two greater poets never noticed: existentialism.
I may be philosophically out of line to call Matthew Arnold an existentialist, because he certainly is not that in his criticism. But in his poetry, he is. Works like The Scholar Gipsy, The Last Word, and Dover Beach are modern and chaotic in the same sense that much of the early 20th Century’s poetry is, just much more understandable.
Finally, there is something endearing about Arnold’s amateurishness. It makes us feel that our own feelings about modern life are worth attempting to express in poetry.
Personal – 4/5
Christopher Hitchens once made a strong argument in favor of George Orwell by calling him “so obviously not a genius.”
What Hitchens meant was that Orwell ought to be an inspiration to average non-geniuses because he proved that, by living and thinking with integrity, he was still able to come to the right conclusions and write very well. I would make that same argument in favor of Matthew Arnold generally, and especially with regard to his poetry. There is nothing genius about it, but it’s honest, reflective, and dignified in a way that exceeds many writers of real genius.
Despite disagreeing with much of Arnold’s criticism, I’ve always liked the man for who he was. This was my first encounter with his poetry, and it was much better than I expected. It has its faults, but they were curiously not the same faults you find in his criticism. For one, Matthew Arnold the poet is much more endearing. Arnold once wrote to John Henry Newman, telling him that he and Wordsworth were two of the people that Arnold had consciously “learned from.” There is much of both Wordsworth's and Cardinal Newman’s truth to conscience in Matthew Arnold. He was a very sincere man, and that sincerity is expressed in his better poetry.
The Buried Life is one of those poems in which Arnold covers the whole spectrum of our attempts to hide our feelings. We can feel his strain:
”A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart that beats
So wild, so deep in us, to know
Whence our thoughts come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas, none ever mines:
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown on each talent and power,
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves;
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress’d.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well — but ‘tis not true:”
But it ends with a quiet resolution. A touching expression of those moments when we allow love to reveal the buried life within each of us:
”Only — but this is rare —
When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen’d ear
Is by the tones of a lov’d voice caress’d, —
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again:
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.”
- Matthew Arnold, in a letter to his MOTHER!
Reputation – 3/5
As a poet, Matthew Arnold has never had his day. By middle age he was devoting almost all his writing to literary criticism and it is literary criticism for which he is remembered today. Arnold was naturally more of a critic than a poet, but he lived during a time when it was not unusual for a man to decide he wanted to write poems and to publish them himself. We no longer live in that time, and a man who spends his time writing poetry, we view with at least a bit of a sidelong glance. But in the Victorian Era, amateurs still wrote poetry.
Point – 3/5
The critic John Cowper Powys once called Matthew Arnold “the great amateur” of English poetry. And indeed, there is something very amateurish about Arnold’s poetry. That is not to say that it is bad.
By critical overuse the word “amateur” has come to carry a negative connotation. It has come to mean something like “inept,” when the word itself literally means “one who loves” in the original French. As G.K. Chesterton wrote
“A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well.”
Matthew Arnold is exactly this kind of amateur. He nearly admits so much himself in the above-quoted letter to his mother. The letter is an almost unbelievably frank self-assessment, and it is precisely correct, excepting its last clause. Arnold’s poetry never had its day.
But that is not entirely his fault. It is true that he had a profounder understanding of the “main line of modern development” than any other poet of his time. Arnold knows that deep down, under the veneer of Victorian civilization, something is rotten. He doesn’t quite know what it is, but his pessimism is palpable.
”O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o’ertax’d, its palsied hearts, was rife —“
He is the first English poet to call his age diseased. The metaphor seems trite to us now, but Arnold wrote those lines in 1853. It comes from a poem called The Scholar Gipsy, which the critic in Arnold didn’t like. He wrote:
“Homer animates – Shakespeare animates, in its poor way I think Sohrab and Rustum (another of Arnold’s poems) animates – the ‘Gipsy Scholar’ at best awakens a pleasing melancholy. But this is not what we want.
The complaining millions of men
Darken in labour and pain–
what they want is something to animate and ennoble them – not merely to add zest to their melancholy or grace to their dreams.”
Other critics disagreed and called it one of his best poems.
And here we come to the fundamental discord in Matthew Arnold: as a critic, he does not believe in his own poetry.
When the critic in Arnold tries to write poetry, he writes long-winded attempts at philosophical poetry with far too many classical allusions. He tries too hard to show off his learning to the poetry-reading class, or perhaps he thinks that his immortality will be ensured by his communication with the canon. But all this is very tiresome, especially when we see what Matthew Arnold the natural poet is capable of.
The poet in Arnold has a great natural intuition for personal depth and profound meditation. In his best moments, he is very much like his hero, Wordsworth, only more pessimistic.
And I, I know not if to pray
Still to be what I am, or yield, and be
Like all the other men I see.
For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where in the sun’s hot eye,
With heads bent o’er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give,
Dreaming of naught beyond their prison wall.
And as, year after year,
Fresh products of their barren labour fall
From their tired hands, and rest
Never yet comes more near,
Gloom settles slowly down over their breast.
And while they try to stem
The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,
Death in their prison reaches them
Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.
And the rest, a few, Escape their prison, and depart
On the wide Ocean of Life anew.
There the freed prisoner, where’er his heart
Listeth, will sail;
Nor does he know how there prevail,
Despotic on life’s sea,
Trade-winds that cross it from eternity.
A while he holds some false way, undebarr’d
By thwarting signs, and braves
The freshening wind and blackening waves.
And then the tempest strikes him, and between
The lightning bursts is seen
Only a driving wreck,
And the pale Master on his spar-strewn deck
With anguish’d face and flying hair
Grasping the rudder hard,
Still bent to make some port he knows not where,
Still standing for some false impossible shore.
And sterner comes the roar
Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom
Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,
And he too disappears, and comes no more.
Is there no life, but these alone?
Madman or slave, must man be one?”
This is really good stuff. It gets right to the heart of “modern life” as Arnold identified it and as we end up living it. So why didn’t Arnold the poet have his day?
The first reason, it seems to me, is that while Arnold is indeed pessimistic, he never could have predicted how completely hopeless and nihilistic the world would become. He was, after all, born in 1822, grew up with an Eminently Victorian schoolmaster father, and died in 1888. He could not have imagined a Europe that would recklessly launch itself into the cultural suicide of the First World War. That was a turning point in the line of modern life that Arnold simply couldn’t have predicted. And the consequences of it tossed his age, with all its morals and poetic stylizing, forever into the dustbin of history. This is not Matthew Arnold’s fault.
The second reason actually is Arnold’s fault. And that is that Matthew Arnold the critic killed Matthew Arnold the poet. The man who began as an amateur in the French sense of the word ("a lover”) ended up condemning himself as an amateur in its modern sense (“a tepid dabbler”).
To return to the letter that he wrote his mother, it seems he came to believe that his poems would never have their day, and that he would be better off just not writing them.
Recommendation – 4/5
It may seem strange to try to revive Matthew Arnold as poet, but I think, he does deserve his day after all. He will never have his day in the same sense that Tennyson or Browning had theirs, but he was absolutely correct in saying that his poetry addressed something that those two greater poets never noticed: existentialism.
I may be philosophically out of line to call Matthew Arnold an existentialist, because he certainly is not that in his criticism. But in his poetry, he is. Works like The Scholar Gipsy, The Last Word, and Dover Beach are modern and chaotic in the same sense that much of the early 20th Century’s poetry is, just much more understandable.
Finally, there is something endearing about Arnold’s amateurishness. It makes us feel that our own feelings about modern life are worth attempting to express in poetry.
Personal – 4/5
Christopher Hitchens once made a strong argument in favor of George Orwell by calling him “so obviously not a genius.”
What Hitchens meant was that Orwell ought to be an inspiration to average non-geniuses because he proved that, by living and thinking with integrity, he was still able to come to the right conclusions and write very well. I would make that same argument in favor of Matthew Arnold generally, and especially with regard to his poetry. There is nothing genius about it, but it’s honest, reflective, and dignified in a way that exceeds many writers of real genius.
Despite disagreeing with much of Arnold’s criticism, I’ve always liked the man for who he was. This was my first encounter with his poetry, and it was much better than I expected. It has its faults, but they were curiously not the same faults you find in his criticism. For one, Matthew Arnold the poet is much more endearing. Arnold once wrote to John Henry Newman, telling him that he and Wordsworth were two of the people that Arnold had consciously “learned from.” There is much of both Wordsworth's and Cardinal Newman’s truth to conscience in Matthew Arnold. He was a very sincere man, and that sincerity is expressed in his better poetry.
The Buried Life is one of those poems in which Arnold covers the whole spectrum of our attempts to hide our feelings. We can feel his strain:
”A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart that beats
So wild, so deep in us, to know
Whence our thoughts come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas, none ever mines:
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown on each talent and power,
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves;
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress’d.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well — but ‘tis not true:”
But it ends with a quiet resolution. A touching expression of those moments when we allow love to reveal the buried life within each of us:
”Only — but this is rare —
When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen’d ear
Is by the tones of a lov’d voice caress’d, —
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again:
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.”
June 28, 2022
Superb poem in which Arnold laments the lack of meaning and certainty in the absence of religion.
He calls his partner over to the window and laments that he feels the same tragedy in the rolling waves of Dover Beach that Sophocles brought to life from the Aegean:
“ Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, 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.”
He grieves the lost certainty of religious faith that once guarded the coastline and is left with just the naked shingles of both beach and spirit.
“ 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.”
Arnold implores his partner at least to offer some sense of security in his life, they could attempt to be true to one another. Deep down he understands this is an unlikely prospect and the future is bleak.
“ 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.”
He calls his partner over to the window and laments that he feels the same tragedy in the rolling waves of Dover Beach that Sophocles brought to life from the Aegean:
“ Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, 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.”
He grieves the lost certainty of religious faith that once guarded the coastline and is left with just the naked shingles of both beach and spirit.
“ 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.”
Arnold implores his partner at least to offer some sense of security in his life, they could attempt to be true to one another. Deep down he understands this is an unlikely prospect and the future is bleak.
“ 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.”
September 18, 2025
A solid collection of decent poems interspersed with brief moments of brilliance.
Owen’s Review: 4/5 oranges - the poem about a mermaid was cool, but a lot of the rest was a little old and confusing.
Owen’s Review: 4/5 oranges - the poem about a mermaid was cool, but a lot of the rest was a little old and confusing.
February 7, 2017
Dover Beach is lovely!!
November 19, 2025
Matthew Arnold, one of the most important poets of the Victorian period, is often described as the melancholic voice and the pessimistic poet of his age. As a Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, he wrote many influential poems, and among them “Dover Beach” remains a favourite for readers.
The poem presents a quiet, intimate moment where the speaker and his beloved stand by a window overlooking the English Channel from Dover. In the calm evening, the sound of the waves creates a reflective, almost haunting mood. This “grating roar” of the sea reminds the speaker of the “eternal sadness of the human condition.” Arnold also refers to Sophocles, the ancient Greek tragedian, who long ago heard the same kind of sound and felt similar human sorrow — showing that human suffering is timeless.
A major concern of the poem is the decline of religious faith during the Victorian era. Arnold laments that the once strong “Sea of Faith” is slowly retreating, leaving human life spiritually empty. People have become more focused on science, progress, and material achievements, but emotionally and morally, they feel lost and disconnected. Human relationships have also become unstable and unreliable.
In the final part, the poet turns to his beloved and urges them to remain true to each other. The world may seem beautiful and peaceful on the surface, but beneath it lies confusion, struggle, and loneliness. Only genuine love, honesty, and mutual support can give meaning in such a chaotic world.
Overall, “Dover Beach” is a deeply emotional and thoughtful poem, blending personal feeling with universal human concerns. It captures the Victorian crisis of faith and expresses Arnold’s longing for stability, truth, and love in a world full of uncertainty.
The poem presents a quiet, intimate moment where the speaker and his beloved stand by a window overlooking the English Channel from Dover. In the calm evening, the sound of the waves creates a reflective, almost haunting mood. This “grating roar” of the sea reminds the speaker of the “eternal sadness of the human condition.” Arnold also refers to Sophocles, the ancient Greek tragedian, who long ago heard the same kind of sound and felt similar human sorrow — showing that human suffering is timeless.
A major concern of the poem is the decline of religious faith during the Victorian era. Arnold laments that the once strong “Sea of Faith” is slowly retreating, leaving human life spiritually empty. People have become more focused on science, progress, and material achievements, but emotionally and morally, they feel lost and disconnected. Human relationships have also become unstable and unreliable.
In the final part, the poet turns to his beloved and urges them to remain true to each other. The world may seem beautiful and peaceful on the surface, but beneath it lies confusion, struggle, and loneliness. Only genuine love, honesty, and mutual support can give meaning in such a chaotic world.
Overall, “Dover Beach” is a deeply emotional and thoughtful poem, blending personal feeling with universal human concerns. It captures the Victorian crisis of faith and expresses Arnold’s longing for stability, truth, and love in a world full of uncertainty.
December 18, 2025
Ponders in a beautiful way.
February 14, 2020
Examples of Symbolism in Dover Beach.
Arnold's Dover beach is a good example of poems that uses symbolism perfectly. It gives readers a good opportunity to think of, analyze and discuss its symbols' meanings. Although the poem is 37 lines only, Arnold was able to present well-set symbols that serve his poem's purposes, Moving from using Sea, Moon and Tide to the Night and Sky.
The most significant symbol used in the poem is the Sea. Readers can see it as the mind of a human being where it is calm at a certain point and wavy at another. Also they can see it as an expression of a changing world where everything might be clear at the top but ambiguous deep down. It’s calm at the beginning but throughout the poem it starts to take another shape as it's affected by the shifting in thoughts and facts throw time. Using the sea to refer to the process of changing was very beautiful and expressive.
Another symbol used in the poem is the Night. At first readers might feel that the usage of the night in the first stanza to establish a calm and peaceful atmosphere is the only purpose that Arnold intended, but a good reader can notice that it moved from reflecting peace and relaxation to reflecting desolation and fear in the third and fourth stanza. While the wind is sweet in the night of the first stanza, it's threatening and evil at the night of the two following stanzas. The night became a symbol of loneliness and confusion. So there's no wonder that Arnold has ended his poem using the word "Night", leaving us abandoned in a dark, faithless and horrifying world just like the night itself.
Ebb and flow are also a part of Arnold's symbolic game. They can be seen as an expression of the eternal clash between nations, referring to the fact that it's our fate to have enemies all the time. But since the poem says that that ebb and flow is decreasing, we can see it as an expression of loss of a faith that have been known and believed for a long time! And what a beautiful way is this to describe that kind of conflict between believing and faithlessness.
There are more symbols in the poem that can be read differently by readers. Finally, I would like to highlight the idea that most of the symbols used in Dover Beach are focusing on the theme of change, a change from calmness to madness, if I may say.
Arnold's Dover beach is a good example of poems that uses symbolism perfectly. It gives readers a good opportunity to think of, analyze and discuss its symbols' meanings. Although the poem is 37 lines only, Arnold was able to present well-set symbols that serve his poem's purposes, Moving from using Sea, Moon and Tide to the Night and Sky.
The most significant symbol used in the poem is the Sea. Readers can see it as the mind of a human being where it is calm at a certain point and wavy at another. Also they can see it as an expression of a changing world where everything might be clear at the top but ambiguous deep down. It’s calm at the beginning but throughout the poem it starts to take another shape as it's affected by the shifting in thoughts and facts throw time. Using the sea to refer to the process of changing was very beautiful and expressive.
Another symbol used in the poem is the Night. At first readers might feel that the usage of the night in the first stanza to establish a calm and peaceful atmosphere is the only purpose that Arnold intended, but a good reader can notice that it moved from reflecting peace and relaxation to reflecting desolation and fear in the third and fourth stanza. While the wind is sweet in the night of the first stanza, it's threatening and evil at the night of the two following stanzas. The night became a symbol of loneliness and confusion. So there's no wonder that Arnold has ended his poem using the word "Night", leaving us abandoned in a dark, faithless and horrifying world just like the night itself.
Ebb and flow are also a part of Arnold's symbolic game. They can be seen as an expression of the eternal clash between nations, referring to the fact that it's our fate to have enemies all the time. But since the poem says that that ebb and flow is decreasing, we can see it as an expression of loss of a faith that have been known and believed for a long time! And what a beautiful way is this to describe that kind of conflict between believing and faithlessness.
There are more symbols in the poem that can be read differently by readers. Finally, I would like to highlight the idea that most of the symbols used in Dover Beach are focusing on the theme of change, a change from calmness to madness, if I may say.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 16, 2015
Even though I am extremely weary of sage writers - those doling out critique as poetry - and even though Matthew Arnold's philosophy of moderating our desires rather than living in dreams of something that may never be attained, is one I have no penchant for I am attracted to the simplicity and naivete of his words.
'Dover Beach' is hypnotic and surreal. It leaves you feeling queasy and unsettled. You don't want to agree with Arnold and yet agreement is what is reached.
Consider these beautiful lyrical lines, for example from Dover Beach:
"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."
or these lines from" "Absence," where the necessary choice between feeling and reason, and the pain of making it, elicit a cry of anguish:
"But each day brings its petty dust
Our soon-choked souls to fill,
And we forget because we must
And not because we will.
I struggle towards the light; and ye,
Once-longed-for storms of love!
If with the light ye cannot be,
I bear that ye remove."
However, it must also be said that Matthew Arnold is a very good but highly derivative poet.
'Dover Beach' is hypnotic and surreal. It leaves you feeling queasy and unsettled. You don't want to agree with Arnold and yet agreement is what is reached.
Consider these beautiful lyrical lines, for example from Dover Beach:
"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."
or these lines from" "Absence," where the necessary choice between feeling and reason, and the pain of making it, elicit a cry of anguish:
"But each day brings its petty dust
Our soon-choked souls to fill,
And we forget because we must
And not because we will.
I struggle towards the light; and ye,
Once-longed-for storms of love!
If with the light ye cannot be,
I bear that ye remove."
However, it must also be said that Matthew Arnold is a very good but highly derivative poet.
May 7, 2015
Matthew Arnold can zero in on existential loneliness when he wants ("The Buried Life," "Morality") but most of these poems feel too schoolmarm-y, abounding in well-schooled Greco-Roman imagery, corny idyllic landscapes, and gushy phraseology. I prefer when Arnold pares it all down to quotidian despair. That part feels timeless and inclines me to keep the slim collection despite the fatuous excesses of a fable like "Sohrab and Rustum."
June 24, 2021
Although the content is controversial, he is not fully wrong about extremism, whether we lean towards science or religion. Faith cannot be scientifically proven, yet it protects us from the harsh reality of life. We need science but it provides little room for miracles.
May 3, 2022
"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..."
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..."
November 17, 2012
Can't believe that I never heard of Matthew Arnold, his poems are so good.
March 27, 2018
I suppose that I was supposed to be thoroughly impressed by Matthew Arnold's poetry, but it left much to be desired in my opinion.
January 27, 2026
I read Dover Beach many years ago, and found it lovely, and had long intended to read a larger collection of Arnold's work. I've finally done so, and I wasn't moved at all by any of the works. In fact, even a re-reading of Dover Beach made me wonder what I saw in it the first time. This is not a complete criticism. I do think some of Arnold's use of language is evocative enough, and his subjects often well chosen. But there is an awkward inaccessibility that seems drawn not from brilliance but merely from the passing of time, and even when the poems were well-written, they left me uninspired. Not a bad collection, but I'll not likely revisit it.
April 15, 2024
FULL REVIEW ON MY WEBSITE
https://thebookcornerchronicles.com/2...
The plot in this one is kind of controversial here, but I gotta Gove the author points for some of the things he said in this poem.
This poem makes some very good points about extremism and faith in god or satan depending on what you believe.
The writing style in this one was kind of weak, it felt like this poem was just a draft which got published by a mistake.
To me this poem felt like melancholic and almost nihilistic for whatever reason.
https://thebookcornerchronicles.com/2...
The plot in this one is kind of controversial here, but I gotta Gove the author points for some of the things he said in this poem.
This poem makes some very good points about extremism and faith in god or satan depending on what you believe.
The writing style in this one was kind of weak, it felt like this poem was just a draft which got published by a mistake.
To me this poem felt like melancholic and almost nihilistic for whatever reason.
July 8, 2024
The melancholy speaker in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” compares the “ebb and flow” of waves to the “eternal note of sadness” that seems to permeate incessantly throughout the world. The sea is also compared to religion, which, like a wave, has retreated, leaving nothing but pain, confusion, and emptiness.
June 1, 2026
Matthew Arnold-এর এই কাব্যসংকলনে ভিক্টোরিয়ান যুগের মানসিক অনিশ্চয়তা, আধ্যাত্মিক সংকট এবং আধুনিক জীবনের নৈতিক বিভ্রান্তিকে অত্যন্ত সূক্ষ্ম ও বিষণ্ণ কাব্যভঙ্গিতে উপস্থাপন করা হয়েছে। শিরোনাম কবিতা Dover Beach-এ সমুদ্রের ঢেউ ও রাতের নীরবতা ব্যবহার করে বিশ্বাসের ক্ষয় এবং মানবজীবনের অনিশ্চয়তাকে গভীরভাবে তুলে ধরা হয়েছে।
November 12, 2018
Although I am glad that I read this, it will probably be the last collection of Victorian poetry that I wade through—too much like an English assignment for me. That being said, I did enjoy a number of these verses, though none more than the title work. So I ended where I started—on Dover Beach.
August 10, 2021
This is definitely heady poetry - and I found it hard to get into. The lyric poems would require much break down, which I'm just not up to. My favorite was "Sohrab and Rustum," which was a fairly lengthy narrative poem about father and son warriors.
June 13, 2024
Arnold 's privileged a$5 complaining about his Biblical truths being disproved by evolutionary theories, written in standard flowery language. Inserting some standard philosophical lamentations about "the turbid ebb and flow of human misery".
May 21, 2017
Dover Beach is one of the most beautiful poems ever written.
May 12, 2022
Amazing work, very touching poem.
March 4, 2023
I enjoyed the blank verse poem Sohrab and Rustum.
November 24, 2024
2 1\2 stars.
January 17, 2020
The rhythmic sway of "where ignorant armies clash by night."
..
Dover Beach
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
The sea is calm tonight.
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 Ægean, 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.
..
Dover Beach
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
The sea is calm tonight.
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 Ægean, 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.
February 28, 2023
I almost never read poetry, that is not a boast it is an embarrassed confession. But I read the title poem in this collection today because I wanted to try and explain something about faith and how long it has ceased to be a factor in people's lives and I remembered this poem. It is all about the author's realisation that it was impossible to maintain belief and faith or belief based on faith anymore. German Biblical scholarship in the 19th century had stripped away the magic - miracles, virgin birth, etc. He was not ceasing to believe in God but he knew something was lost, at least for men like of faith and intelligence.
It is just bizarre that positions and ideas that Victorians accepted in the 1850s would be to controversial for almost any politician or public figure in the USA.
This is a stunningly beautiful poem. It is the only one have read but I think I may read more poems.
It is just bizarre that positions and ideas that Victorians accepted in the 1850s would be to controversial for almost any politician or public figure in the USA.
This is a stunningly beautiful poem. It is the only one have read but I think I may read more poems.
September 28, 2014
Arnold is best known for "Dover Beach", but my favorite poem of his is "Rugby Chapel", his remembrance of his father.
"Yes! I believe that there lived
Others like thee in the past,
Not like the men of the crowd
Who all round me to-day
Bluster or cringe, and make life
Hideous, and arid, and vile;
But souls temper'd with fire,
Fervent, heroic, and good,
Helpers and friends of mankind.
Servants of God!—or sons
Shall I not call you? Because
Not as servants ye knew
Your Father's innermost mind,
His, who unwillingly sees
One of his little ones lost—
Yours is the praise, if mankind
Hath not as yet in its march
Fainted, and fallen, and died!"
"Yes! I believe that there lived
Others like thee in the past,
Not like the men of the crowd
Who all round me to-day
Bluster or cringe, and make life
Hideous, and arid, and vile;
But souls temper'd with fire,
Fervent, heroic, and good,
Helpers and friends of mankind.
Servants of God!—or sons
Shall I not call you? Because
Not as servants ye knew
Your Father's innermost mind,
His, who unwillingly sees
One of his little ones lost—
Yours is the praise, if mankind
Hath not as yet in its march
Fainted, and fallen, and died!"
May 6, 2015
Poems read so far--
To a Friend--2
The Forsaken Merman--3
The Strayed Reveller--1
Shakespeare--2
Resignation--2
To a Republican Friend, 1848--2
Memorial Verses--2
The Buried Life--3
Lines Written in Kensington Gardens--3
Indifference (aka Euphrosyne)--2
Absence--2
A Summer Night--3
Morality--1
Stanzas in Memory of the Author of "Obermann"--1
The Future--1
The Scholar Gypsy--2
Sohrab and Rustum--not read
Requiescat--2
Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse--2
Isolation: To Marguerite--2
A Southern Night--2
Thyrsis--2
Dover Beach--5
Immortality--2
Rugby Chapel--3
The Last Word--2
To a Friend--2
The Forsaken Merman--3
The Strayed Reveller--1
Shakespeare--2
Resignation--2
To a Republican Friend, 1848--2
Memorial Verses--2
The Buried Life--3
Lines Written in Kensington Gardens--3
Indifference (aka Euphrosyne)--2
Absence--2
A Summer Night--3
Morality--1
Stanzas in Memory of the Author of "Obermann"--1
The Future--1
The Scholar Gypsy--2
Sohrab and Rustum--not read
Requiescat--2
Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse--2
Isolation: To Marguerite--2
A Southern Night--2
Thyrsis--2
Dover Beach--5
Immortality--2
Rugby Chapel--3
The Last Word--2
September 23, 2013
Jeez, this guy's depressed. But unlike some other writers, who I will not further insult by naming them here, he doesn't pass that on to his audience - even in his disappointment and loss, he still finds hope, and all is not lost, so his poems generally end on either an optimistic or, at worst, impersonal note.
All the poems are well written, displaying a variety of styles, with the occasional drop of irreverence (the middle stanzas of Thyrsis), and a heavy dose of tragedy (the other poems in this set).
All the poems are well written, displaying a variety of styles, with the occasional drop of irreverence (the middle stanzas of Thyrsis), and a heavy dose of tragedy (the other poems in this set).
March 10, 2014
Loved the rhyme and the echoes of poignant reality .....
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.
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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