help! i have to write an essay on matthew arnold and how his views pertain to the modern world. the poems i had to read were:

Dover Beach
The Buried Life
The Scholar Gipsy
Stanzas from the grande Charteuse

please help

I would pull out some selected quotes from the various works, and try to tie them together with examples from current events.


( ... )

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

( ... )

Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,

( ... )

But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;

( ... )

Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age,
More fortunate, alas! than we,
Which without hardness will be sage,
And gay without frivolity.
Sons of the world, oh, speed those years;
But, while we wait, allow our tears!

( ... )

I am writing a midterm on the poem Dover Beach like you, I was wondering about the meter nd rhyme scheme of this piece. I'm not sure how to incorporate that into a general analysis and interpretation of the poem. Please give me a clue!!! Thanks Lindy

Unless you're planning on a separate section (The metre of this poem is______; The rhyme scheme is __________), I would probably address them as part of the analysis and interpretation. This isn't a poem with a fixed metre or rhyme scheme. Perhaps you can look at why you think Arnold did his work like this, or how the changing rhythms work on you to make you understand or focus on a certain part.

pam

Dover Beach
by: Matthew Arnold

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-blanch'd 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 furl'd.
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,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

can you help me interpret this poem.

thanks

Which one?

hi can u help me interpret dover beach. i really am not to fond of poetry. so canu please help me understand the entire poem. i mean what is his subject? or wat is he talking about?

It's a love poem.

Amanda, perhaps you have been put off by boring teachers presenting dull poems, but don't let that cramp your mind. You handicap and deprive yourself by taking the stance that you aren't fond of poetry. Much better to accept that some poems will appeal to you and many won't; that some will be easily understandable and many won't; and that there's always a lot of rubbish masquerading as poetry. Then read anthologies open-mindedly to find poems you can enjoy. A bit like choosing friends from all the people you meet. As with people, some poems can be more likeable when you get to understand them.

With 'Dover Beach' it may help you to know that Dover is a part of the English coastline with typically shingled beaches, and high cliffs from which you can just see the coast of France, about 21 miles away. The Aegean is the sea around Greece in the Mediterranean. Sophocles was a Greek poet and playright who lived from 496BC to 406BC, and was famous for the tragedies he wrote. Arnold was writing in England in the 19th Century. His education would have included study of ancient Greek culture and literature. His mood in writing Dover Beach is very melancholy, even though he uses beautiful descriptive language. Listening to the waves on the beach brings to his mind sad thoughts, and he comments that Sophocles felt the same listening to the Aegean Sea. He laments that religious faith is everywhere in decline, that hopes of joy and beauty and comfort are nothing more than vain illusions, and that we are all benighted in a world beset by conflicts between confused and ignorant armies clashing in the dark.

The only positive note he can come up with is rather pathetic: a plea to his unidentified 'love' that they be true to each other, because of all the misery he perceives around them. Hardly the most romantic line to a girl's heart, assuming it was a girl.

For an unromantic response from a 20th century writer there's this one:

The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life
by Anthony Hecht

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, "Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc."
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
the notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
and finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come,
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d'Amour.


Perhaps that one appeals to you more!



Post Edited (11-21-03 21:15)

I think that Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold is completely misunderstood.His eloquence with words is not only profound, but they expose the duplicity in his era. Contrasting the gleaming light that is so fleeting with the eternal cliffs of England show that the only thing solid in his world was the earth beneath him. Darwin had shook his world, creating a roar that was heard across the world. He calls to a lover, telling her than he wants their love to be true, when Europre is swirling with different lies and falsehoods. The long, drawn out sentences suggest that Arnold is trying to emulate the waves of the sea. On the surface, the sea is beautiful and serene, but beneath there is a monster that is ready to be unleased. I think that Arnold feels somewhat alone in the world and that he is uncomfortable with making these realizations on his own. That is why he so desperatly cries for his love to stand beside him, to make him feel like life on this earth is not futile. Faith is a question to him; he doesn't completly embrace Darwinism but his faith has been challenged enough to the point of doubt. This whole poem is a progression: from his optimistic view of the sea, to the perplexing complexity of human life and existence, to the final conclusion that this earth is as ignorant as armies fighting by night.

Interesting points, Yellowrose, especially about the poem being written in the context of the furore aroused by Charles Darwin's book. The first edition of 'The Origin of Species' was published in 1859. 'Dover Beach' was written in 1867.

I can't however see anything in the poem that refers to lies and duplicity. What did you have in mind there? Also can't see in it anything that implies that the persona fears a monster coming out of the sea. The sea's calmness referred to (like the tranquility of the bay) appears to me just a symbol of worldly beauty portrayed as fragile. The persona's melancholy point of view about that is reinforced by the references to the sea's sounds, which the persona interprets as sad.