POETRY ANALISYS – DOVER BEACH, BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
...ht about it because I remembered a sentence from Queen Victoria, which said that “the Sun never sets down in the British empire” (or almost that), referring to the territorial expansion of England during her reign, at the end of the 19th century. But this passage could have another meaning, like to emphasize that “the light” is not there, and that it cannot be seen any longer. It “is gone” and leaves behind only darkness, and in a metaphorical sense of the word, not only the light is gone, but the certainty too, and people can never be certain that the light will ever return. In the second stanza Arnold mentions the Greek author, Sophocles introducing his idea of "the turbid ebb and flow of human misery" (lines 17-18), forming a contrast with the scene of the previous stanza. Sophocles heard a similar sound at the "Aegean" sea (line 16) and then constructed his ideas. Matthew Arnold then reconnects this idea to the present of the poem, making a kind of return to the past, in the pre-Socratic age, a time when the images of enchantment and illusion, and the idealization were frequent in poetry, as well as in the Romanticism, but here the author seems to indicate that in the Victorian age, the illusion is gone when confronted to the reality. The conflict between Religion and Science is perhaps the greater theme proposed by the poet, since in the Victorian age, with the Industrial revolution, and the Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, religion was contested in its principles, and in its way of seeing the world. The Victorian age came as a period of transition, affecting several segments of society, increasing the military power of England, as well as culture in its various aspects, since Art to Literature, with new concepts, different from those until that moment, starting to leave religion to a second plane and concentrating on more realistic points-of-view and sources of inspiration, such as nature. In the third stanza, the "Sea of Faith" (line21), is a clear metaphor for the mentioned decadence of religion practiced in the medieval age. The poet illustrates this aspect through the image of clothes. When the religion was in the power, with no one to contest, the world was dressed "like the folds of a bright girdle furled" (line 23), but with the loss of the faith during the Victorian age, the world appears here naked and desolate. ("the vast edges drear/ And naked shingles of the world" (lines 27-28). The fourth and last stanza begins with a vocative, consisting of a wish, or a desire of the lyrical self, asking his love to be “true” ("Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!" - lines 29 -30), maybe as a reference to the change of feelings imposed by the new concepts of life and religion introduced on the Victorian society. As we can deduce through the reading of the poem, Arnold seems to be against the rigid moral values imposed by the Christianity, showing an agnostic point of view concerning religion. The beautiful scene which appears in the last stanza (“…for the world, which seems/ To lie before us like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new…" (lines 30-32) in fact doesn’t appear to be so beautiful, as the literal sense depicts, because it is emphasized with a series of denials, showing that this world doesn’t contain any of the basic human values, which have disappeared along with the light and religion, leaving humanity in darkness. The use of the pronoun "We", on line 35 could just refer to the lyrical self and his love, but it could also be interpreted as the lyrical self speaking to the humanity. The last line of the poem probably refers to a battle in which the darkness was too dense, that the warriors couldn’t distinguish their friends from the enemies. Concerning form, "Dover Beach" consists of four stanzas, each one with a variable ...