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"Dover Beach" is poem of melancholy and sadness.- Discuss
"Dover Beach", written by Matthew Arnold, a famous elegiac poet, critic, and educationalist of the Victorian era, was published in 1867. At that time the country England was involved between science and religion, between Romanticism and Classicism, between materialism and spiritualism. This poem reflects a distinct picture of the poet's melancholic view of life as well as the representation of Victorian loss of faith as a consequence of the rapid growth of science and commerce with the publication of Darwin's "The Origin of Species" in 1859.
An elegy is a poem of mourning or a song of lamentation. And Arnold is a poet of melancholy and in this respect he is definitely different from his great contemporaries, like
Tennyson, Browning. His well - known poems like "The Scholar Gipsy", "Rugby Chapel",
"Thyrsis" bear thoroughly his melancholic and elegiac tone.
Arnold's elegiac note is also predominant in ‘Dover Beach’ as usual. The poet is found to lament here not for the death of any person, but for the loss of the simple faith and for the
SEM –III (Hons.) , Paper-C5T : Victorian Period ( 1832-1900)
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loss of beauty and culture in the prevalent situation. He laments deeply for this state of the present age that has ".....neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain."
In "Dover Beach", Arnold's melancholic view is distinct, penetrative, yet tender. Set against the scenic charm of the Northern sea near Dover Beach, the poem contains a good deal of gloomy reflections of modern life. But here, in this poem the sea is not merely a background, but a symbol of religious faith and its 'grating roar' symbolizes the decline of the faith. Being a Victorian pessimist to the core, the poet perceives the crumbling away of religious faith during his time. He now hears 'the eternal note of sadness'. He mourns the fact that "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 he hears only
"Its melancholy."
Not only our poet, but also, the Greek tragedian Sophocles heard the same sound of melancholy long ago :
SEM –III (Hons.) , Paper-C5T : Victorian Period ( 1832-1900)
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"Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery."
At the end of the poem, the poet says that the world appeared to be a dreamland of beauty in past, but now ----
"We are here as on a darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and fight/ Where ignorant armies clash by night."
The pessimism of these lines is hardly to be paralleled in literature.It may surpass even that of
Hardy, the prince among the pessimistic writers.
Melancholy is a key element in Arnold's poem and is also a part of his moral and intellectual approach to life as known to and seen by him in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, that was so impressive an affair in the Victorian world yet confounding, chaotic,and degenerating
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in the ultimate turn of events.
Nothing could be more profoundly melancholy than the present poem "Dover
Beach", "yet there is nothing maudlin, nothing unmanly about it." In the words of H. W. Paul,
"Profoundly melancholy in tone it expresses the peculiar turn of Mr. Arnold's mind, at once religious and skeptical, philosophical and emotional, better than his formal treatises on philosophy and religion. In spite of the loss of religious faith, Arnold does not loss his heart, as he still finds consolation, a heaven of rest and peace, in true love."
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‘Dover Beach’ is a representatitive poem in the Victorian Period
‘Dover Beach’ neatly embraces one of the main contradictions at the heart of Victorian society. On the one hand, Victorian England was a deeply religious country, one in
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which matters of religion were regarded with a high degree of importance. Levels of church attendance were remarkably high, and just about everybody believed in God.
Yet at the same time, doubts as to the veracity of the Bible began to creep in among the educated classes. German liberal theologians (with whose work Arnold was doubtless familiar) had put forward the idea that the Bible was like any other book and should therefore be examined accordingly. Among other things, this new approach to Scriptural interpretation precluded any literal interpretation of the Bible. The higher criticism, as it was called, soon spread to England, undermining the widely-held Protestant belief in the inerrancy of Scripture.
In addition, the traditional certainties of Victorian religion were under attack from developments in natural science. Lyell had demonstrated by the use of fossil records that the earth was much older than the Bible's account would suggest. And, most famously of all, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection called the biblical account of creation even further into question by showing how different species had developed and mutated.
In the midst of all this rapid change, Arnold recognizes that life will never be the same again. He doesn't seek to change the course of the outgoing tide and the receding of the old certainties it symbolizes; he's too much of a Victorian not to believe in the inevitability of human progress. Instead, he humbly enjoins his wife and his Victorian audience to hold fast to that which they love and be true to themselves as the storm of doubt continues to rage outside.
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What is Victorian in "Dover Beach" is, of course, the sense of spiritual loss and doubt. However, in addition to those, several things make this Victorian. First, the mix of continuity and failure. Queen Victoria was on the throne for a long time; this creates a sense of continuity. However, many of the institutions of British society are failing or changing. Second, the re-use of classical references to new ends, such as commenting on Arnold's own society. Third, Arnold's own poetic theories. Arnold argued for higher culture as a way to replace the lost faith he comments on in the poem. The poem itself is exchanged between two people who stand apart from the place "where ignorant armies clash by night," much as the bastions of higher culture must do for the ignorant clashes of mass culture."
What is the most Victorian about this piece is its sense of spiritual doubt. While the Victorian Age (1830-1901) is primarily viewed as a time of great progress and the attainment of world power for England, there were also serious spiritual doubts beginning to take hold in the culture. Much of this can be attributed to the rise of scientific theories that no longer included a "creator" such as Darwin's theory of evolution (The Origin of Species was published in 1859). In the face of his doubt, the speaker in "Dover Beach" suggests that human love may be the only substitute for this kind of spiritual loss.
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SEM –III (Hons.) , Paper-C5T : Victorian Period ( 1832-1900)