By Matthew Arnold | 2 Comments | 
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Dover Beach
The sea is calm to-night.
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 Aegean, 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,
When ignorant armies clash by night.
What a magnificent poem. One of the privileges of acting as mentor for young people is being present when they encounter great texts. The “conversation of humanity” indeed.
Matthew Arnold a very interesting figure. Son of a profoundly devout Christian (whom he greatly admired), Arnold himself lacked any belief in a transcendent deity. His reflection here on the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of “the sea of faith” is elegiac. Arnold lived through the period when Darwin’s thought was first presented, and when “Darwin’s bulldog”, T. H. Huxley, delighted in skewering religious critics of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
To be sure, Thomas Arnold’s piety was of the “strenuous Christianity/social gospel” sort. A sort of way station along the decline in Christian witness in the West.
Arnold’s “sweetness and light” in the face of the crass materialism of Victorian England had its charm, and the poem itself is in my view magnificent, but things have declined much further for us than when he wrote this.
Because, with his classical education, he was able to gracefully invoke Sophocles while viewing the beach, he demonstrates, despite the melancholy mood of the poem, the power of connecting the ways and days of our race.
After Arnold, think of Eliot’s “Waste Land” and “Hollow Men”. Further decline of the overall situation. The catastrophe of the Great War. Pound’s heroic efforts to “make it new” foundered on the collapse of the fascist/nazi attempts to re-establish Western greatness.
But Eliot (who was a banker himself) and Pound knew a thing or two about the iron grip of the finance industry–and that industry would not tolerate a non-Jewish hegemony.
Facing dire prospects is a challenge to what is best in us. By all means, let us be true to one another–and not simply as couples.
Not much for poetry, but thank you for publishing this one…of which I’d heard – Samuel Barber did a fine musical setting of it – but never read. Now I know where those tremendous and prophetic concluding lines come from.