‘Dover Beach’ as an elegy

Matthew Arnold's ‘Dover Beach’ is a finest specimen of modernity, meditation

and elegiac tone. Melancholy forms the main theme of Arnold's poetry. His

poetry is clearly expressive of his pessimistic view of life.His genius is basically

elegiac.According to Hugh Walker,

Nothing in Arnold’s verse is more arresting than its elegiac element. It is not too

much to say that there is no other English poet in whom the elegiac spirit so

reigns as it does in him; ---he found in the elegy the outlet, of his native

melancholy of the‘ Virgilian cry’ over the mournfulness of mortal destiny. It is

the natural tone of an agnostic who is not jubilant, but regretful of the vanished

faith, --- regretful of its beauty, regretful of the lost promise.(47)

It is an elegy expressing the misery and sorrows of human beings.An elegy is a

poem of mourning or a song of lamentation. It is an elegy giving expression to

the poet's own doubts related to life. He saw miseries and pains of people in this

world. He found relief in true love only.

‘Dover Beach’presents the ephemeral human feeling of sadness through the

image of the sea. Arnold is a poet of melancholy and in this respect he is

definitely different from his great contemporaries like Tennyson and

Browning.The genesis of Arnold’s melancholy may be traced back to the trends

and tendencies of the age he lived in. The conflict between religion and science,
which shook men's faith in God, men’s loss of the sense of the spiritual values

of life, which was generated by the unprecedented material prosperity in the

Victorian Age, the thought that man does not control his own destiny, but is

controlled by some power beyond and above himself –all produced in him the

melancholic mood.

In this poem the poet stands on the beach near Dover and observers the calm

and quite sea. The moon shines in all her glory. The poet says that there is a

silence atmosphere at night. There is a serious calmness everywhere in the

atmosphere:

The sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the Straits; (Arnold112)

Presumably the poet is overwhelmed by the fascinating beauty of the landscape,

the seascape and the skyscape. He asks his beloved to come to the window and

enjoy the sweetness of the surrounding: “sweet in the night air!” But at the next

moment, Arnold returns to his own self and feels like granting roar of the

withdrawing pebbles that brings in his mind a note ofeternalsadness. He thinks

that there is everyone looking calm outside but in reality, they have a great pain

inside.
‘Dover Beach’ expresses the loss of faith in contemporary society. To the poet

the world is a vale of tears, a place to endure and to suffer. Here the poet

reminded of Sophocles, the great Greek tragedian, must have experienced the

same melancholy feeling, when he saw the turbid ebb and flow of the waves of

the Aegean Sea. It indicates that the sea has ever been a source of inspiration to

the philosophers to think over the problems of human beings. The rushing of the

waves on the shore and the withdrawal of the same from it, with the long

melancholy roar, must have reminded Sophocles of the alternative rise and fall

of the tide of human misery. The sound produced by the ebb and flow of the

turbid waves of the northern sea fills his mind with the thought of human plight

and misfortune. This is how Arnold finds a close affinity between himself and

this great scholar in realizing the meaning of life andarticulating same in poetry:

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegean and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; (113)

The poet then laments over the loss of men’s faith in religion. He is shocked to

notice man's detachment from the principles of Christianity, and this

detachment has entailed degeneration of social, moral and spiritual values of

life. Faithlessness in religion governs man’s outlook on life. Materialism has

thinks that faith once filled the minds of men and properly guided them to lead

ideal life; but now faith has become a thing of the past. Faith of religion is

shaken. There is a breakdown of values and ideals. With the disappearance of

faith the society looks like a naked shingled beach:

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 shingled of the world. (113)

The lines from ‘Dover Beach’ give bitter expression of Arnold’s growing

pessimism. Kenneth Allott finds in the above quoted lines, a vivid poetic

equivalent for Arnold’s feelings of loss, exposure and dismay. To Arnold, the

world seems like without joy and happiness, aim and hope, love and light,

certainty and peace.Anxiety, problem, pain, sorrow and suffering prevail in the

world. The isolation from man to man and the ruined human destiny produces in

him a deep depression. The poet says that the people in the world run after the

luxuries and worldly things to get peace and happiness. They forget the reality

of this world while achieving other things but they do not know that this things

cannot give them inner peace and happiness.

light in the darkness of sorrows and miseries. Arnoldpoints out that the world

which seems very charming, attractive and dreamland of beauty from outside

but internally it does not give joy and happiness and relief from pain:

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. (113-114)

In the concluding remark, it can be say that the elegiac note is dominant

in‘Dover Beach’. It is a poem of Arnold’s melancholic mind. There is a deep

strain of melancholy and pessimism which can surpasses Thomas Hardy's

pessimism. He laments deeply for this state of present age that has filled with

disbelief, doubts and miseries due to their loss of faith in religion. Buthe asserts
that only true love can be the source of consolation in hard times and he finds

consolation, a heaven of rest and peace in true love.

Works Cited:

Arnold, Matthew. New poems, Issue 4 Matthew Arnold. Oxford: Macmillan and

company, 1867. Print

Allott, Kenneth. Ed. The poems of Matthew Arnold. London and New York:

Longman Norton, 1965. Print

Walker, Hugh.The Literature of the Victorian Era. New Delhi: S. Chand & Co,

1964. Print

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3825594