Thursday, March 6, 2014

Dover Beach Explication

Matthew Arnold creates a tone of despair and melancholy through the serenity of the coastal French beach. He introduces Dover Beach with lovely imagery of the sea and the moon-visualizing this alludes to a soft and relaxing tone as he continually describes the atmosphere . The poet describes the sounds of the sea along the cliffs of England’s shore and the “grating roar of the pebbles” as they glide back and forth from the water. These images as well as delicate syntax create a beautiful environment but hint to an increasingly more depressing tone, especially when he ends the stanza with, “With tremulous cadence slow, and bring the eternal note of sadness in”. He then begins this connection with the playwright Sophocles, who is known for writing infamous tragedies, and how he looked upon the Aegean Sea and watched the waves as Arnold has done and how they brought him the same sort of sadness. Arnold writes, “ the turbid ebb and flow of human misery”. Water is known in literature to signify change; in this poem the water is described so beautifully, but there is also this emptiness like nothing is being gained from it because the water recedes back into the ocean. The writer mentions a body of water called “The Sea of Faith” that he describes as being once full, but now all he feels are the waves “retreating, to the breath of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world”. Arnold could be talking about how people are slowly separating themselves from religious faith and like the water becoming empty and only flowing back and forth barely touching the shore with melancholy and withdrawal. The last stanza in particular is especially potent due to it’s effective language. It is almost like a prayer; he asks to let people be actually true to one another amidst the world, which seems to be “like a land of dreams”. However the way in which people start to lose their faith in it turn the world into a place devoid of peace, love, joy, light, certitude, and help for pain. He mentions in the very last line of the poem the “ ignorant armies” which could symbolize people quarreling over things such as rights to land or property or human beings and not really seeing the various beauty and wonder the world has to offer them. The overall tone would be a juxtaposition of both sadness and beauty. The delicate imagery creates a sense and feeling of beauty, while the syntax and figurative language suggest a hint of melancholy because people do not really notice the beauty in the world.  

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