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.
These are the first lines of Matthew Arnold’s (1822 – 1888) most famous poem, “Dover Beach.” It was first published in his collection New Poems (1867) but it was composed almost twenty years earlier. Superficially it tells the story of two lovers (presumed to be Arnold and his wife on their honeymoon) listening to the sea with one of them declaiming at length about how the best part of this terrible world is their love for each other.
But a bit of background information first.
Arnold was the son of Doctor Thomas Arnold, principal of Rugby School. He and the school were immortalized in Thomas Hughes genre-defining novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays. His brother Tom was an inspector of schools in Tasmania, a professor of literature at Oxford and the grandfather of Aldous Huxley. His other brother William was an educational administrator in the Punjab and a novelist in his own right. Matthew himself was an inspector of schools for over thirty years.
This history of education and literature is reflected in a lot of Arnold’s poetry: it is soaked in story, myth and history, taking a lot of obscure characters and events and creating a lot of wonderful images, moments and meaning out of them. Arnold utilized these more obscure moments for reasons that he outlined in the famous preface to his 1853 volume of poetry that he simply called Poems.
In this Preface, he outlines what we might now call a manifesto. He talks about what should not be a suitable topic for poetry:
They are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action: in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done.
(an interesting footnote to this quote is that “Nothing to be done” is the first line of Samuel Becket’s Waiting For Godot, the play famously described by one critic as having nothing happen in it twice) Later in the Preface he talks about how…
The modernness or antiquity of an action, therefore, has nothing to do with its fitness for poetical representation: this depends upon its inherent qualities… The date of an action, then, signifies nothing: the action itself, its selection and construction, this is what is all-important… We have critics who seem to direct their attention merely to detached expressions, to the language about the action, not to the action itself.
The proof that Arnold believed this is in the state of the book that it appeared in: it was the second edition of Poems, but with one important difference. The first edition featured his dramatic poem “Empedocles On Etna” about the philosopher who committed suicide by throwing himself into the crater of Mount Etna. It didn’t appear in the second edition and was replaced by the brilliant “Sohrab And Rustum”, a poem beloved by C. S. Lewis, about an unknowing father and son meeting tragically in battle.
Now, you might think that I’ve steered away from “Dover Beach” in talking about this, but I haven’t. What I took away from my initial readings of it and the Preface was the idea that Arnold had taken a moment that he thought was important enough – listening to the waves crash on the shale – to relate an important moment in his own thinking. He was trying to relate an idea that was important to himself in the language of his age. The quality of the moment needed to be expressed in the best language, using the best imagery he could find for it – but it didn’t need to be the most poetical. When I was younger I believed that he meant that the idea was more important than the way it was said. Older me now holds to the idea that an idea needs to be expressed with clarity rather than with a needlessly poetical phrase.
Every line and idea in “Dover Beach” is expressed beautifully and clearly. The doubt and lack of faith it refers to speaks to an age that is beginning to discover that the world they live in was older and more complicated than they had previously believed. Between the time “Dover Beach” was written and when it was published, Charles Darwin published On The Origin Of Species, which is still one of the most talked-about books ever written.
That Arnold was able to take that crisis of faith afflicting the world and turn it into a beautiful declaration of love between humans is wonderful.
However, “Dover Beach” was all through my life before I came to read it.
I first read it when I was at university, but I already knew a lot of lines from it. It was one of those poems that we sometimes seem to have a knowledge of before we actually come to it, rather like the works of Shakespeare.
But I had first encountered it in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, in a scene where the hero of that story, Guy Montag, reads it to his wife and her friends from his stash of outlawed literature. He reduces at least one of them to tears and causes a rift between himself and his wife. The next time I read a quote from it was in David Brin and Gregory Benford’s Heart Of The Comet. That may well have been from one of Benford’s sections because he included the same quote in Timescape, his 1981 novel which I read a year after I read Comet. It was only a year or two later that I finally got to reading the poem for myself and thought it to be a quite bleak piece of writing, dealing as it did with the loss of faith in the modern world that Arnold was living in:
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.
And that last sentence,
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
has always haunted me, with its image of forces battling in darkness for reasons that nobody is really sure of. So much so, in fact, that when I wrote a play after the Port Arthur Massacre about the rise and influence that conspiracy theory was beginning to have on society (it’s never been performed, so don’t go looking for it) I even gave it the title of Ignorant Armies, to reflect how I thought conspiracy theorists live and justify their contrarian lives. (As an aside, I never submitted it for performance anywhere because its length makes it either a very short full-length play or a very long one-act play. The first two scenes don’t really work for me either, but I love the rest of it).
But the idea of the modern world being bereft of any kind of faith and being reliant instead upon the bonds of people holding everything together was also rather appealing to the nascent atheist I was at that time. It’s still an attractive worldview and one that I cling to rather pathetically despite all the evidence I keep getting to the contrary.
And I’m not the only one who adores this poem: a casual search across the internet for some of the more famous lines reveals references from Ian McEwan, Joseph Heller, The Bangles, Cabaret, as well as Supreme Court Judges. It’s a testament to the power of this poem that it can be discovered afresh by so many people 160 years after it was first published, proving that it remains
So various, so beautiful, so new…
You can find out more about Matthew Arnold at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/matthew-arnold
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