Dover Beach

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1867

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Light, Dark, and Sound

Arnold begins “Dover Beach” with light and dark contrasts. It’s nighttime, but many things are visible because the moon is reflecting on the water and illuminating the coast of France and the White Cliffs of Dover:

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 (Lines 1-5).

The moon is bright, the white cliffs in moonlight are bright, the sea and sky are dark. Thus, the elements in the opening lines create an interplay of light and dark.

Yet quickly following these opening lines, readers are plunged into total darkness. When the speaker calls his lover over to the window, it is not to admire the sights but to listen to the sound of waves dragging pebbles across the beach. Instead of navigating by sight, by the end of the first stanza readers are navigating by sound.

Stanza 2 then invokes Sophocles (Line 15), the ancient Greek playwright who wrote Oedipus Rex, the tragic story of a man who stabs his eyeballs rather than look at what he’s done. After blinding himself, Oedipus must navigate the world using senses other than sight, including sound.

Stanza 3 depicts the “Sea of Faith” receding from the world (Lines 21-28). The speaker doesn’t see the sea retreating; instead, he hears it: “But now I only hear / Its [the Sea of Faith] melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” (Lines 25-27). In other words, he apprehends this change the same way Oedipus would—by sound.

Finally, the last stanza depicts a “[…] darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night” (Lines 35-37). It’s difficult to see on this dark, nighttime battlefield. Instead, the “clash” of the “ignorant armies” (Line 37) is apprehensible by the “confused alarms of struggle and flight” (Line 36). In other words, by sound. From the beginning contrasts of light and dark, Arnold has plunged us into darkness and sound. The poem contrasts imagery and senses to suggest how overpowering the forces outside one’s control can feel and appear.

Enjambment

In poetry, when a sentence or phrase runs over one line and onto the next without terminal punctuation, it is known as enjambment. The opposite of enjambment is an end-stopped line where the line is a complete unit and doesn’t spill over to the next line. Though also a literary device, Arnold employs enjambment in “Dover Beach” as a symbol for waves and internal confusion. The first line of “Dover Beach” is end-stopped, but the second is enjambed: “The sea is calm tonight. / The tide is full, the moon lies fair / Upon the straits; on the French coast the light” (Lines 1-3).

At the end of the second line, a reader might reasonably ask, The moon lies fair where? The answer comes on the beginning of the next line: “Upon the straits.” Line 2 is, therefore, enjambed. Of the 37 total lines of the poem, 16 are enjambed (Lines 2, 3, 7, 9, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 24, 26, 27, 29, and 30). That’s nearly half. This enjambment embodies the waves the poem describes, which break on the beach in an overlapping, untidy way. It is also suggestive of the chaos of the modern world the poem describes. The lines are not neat units, instead they run into one another.

Pathetic Fallacy

John Ruskin coined the term “pathetic fallacy” in 1853, but the poetic practice is much older than that (Ruskin, John. “Of the Pathetic Fallacy.” Modern Painters Volume III, Project Gutenberg). A pathetic fallacy is when a poem attributes human emotions to nature or an inanimate object. In “Dover Beach,” the speaker writes that the “tremulous” and “slow” rhythm of the waves dragging pebbles across the beach is “sad” (Lines 13-14). Waves don’t have human feelings, so they can’t really “bring / [t]he eternal note of sadness in” (Lines 13-14), as the speaker claims. This note is in the speaker’s mind and heart, but he projects it outwards and says the waves are bringing melancholy to him. That’s a pathetic fallacy because he’s ascribing a human emotion (sadness) to something in nature (waves). This fallacy is further evidence that the speaker feels confusion and projects it onto the scene by giving inanimate objects human agency.