Today’s Poem: Dover Beach

How we make meaning in a meaningless world

Coastal Landscape near Dover, anonymous painting c. 1810 (Wikimedia Commons)

Goethe diagnosed the sickness of modern times, according to Matthew Arnold. As “Physician of the iron age,” Goethe “struck his finger on the place, / And said: Thou ailest here, and here!” But Wordsworth, ah, Wordsworth, says Arnold: In an “iron time / Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears,” the English poet tried not to diagnose but to treat the wounds of the modern age. And “where will Europe’s latter hour / Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?”

Last Monday here at Poems Ancient and Modern, we looked at William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” Along the way, we noted a genre of modern poetry that places what it perceives as the faults of modernity — the decay of beauty, truth, the ceremonies of innocence — in a historical frame: As medieval faith gave way to the triumphs of modernity, the account of history goes, the enjoyment of those triumphs was gradually overwhelmed by a secondary effect of modern times: the loss of meaning.

We could look at, say, T.S. Eliot’s 1922 The Waste Land — “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” — but The Waste Land is a vastly complex poem. A little more straightforward are such works as Yeats’s 1919 “The Second Coming” or Constantine P. Cavafy’s 1904 “Waiting for the Barbarians.”

Or Matthew Arnold’s 1867 poem, “Dover Beach.” Certainly, there were earlier poems that pointed out the spiritual hole at the center of modernity. Think of Blake’s c. 1793 “Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau” or, for that matter, Goethe’s 1808–1832 Faust. But Arnold is one of the first to give it the specific historical shape of what Max Weber (1864–1920) would call “disenchantment,” with modernity expelling us from the old enchanted garden of meaning. The “great song” will “return no more,” as Yeats put it in a 1929 response to Arnold. We are left, in the famous final lines of “Dover Beach,” on “a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

Etching of Matthew Arnold in 1881 (Wikimedia Commons)

Arnold wanted to be not just Goethe, the diagnostician, but also Wordsworth, the healer. And so, against the loss of meaning that accompanies the culture’s loss of faith, Arnold would propose two solutions — two ways in which human beings can create meaning in a world that no longer presents its own meaning to us.

One is high art. In the essays of Culture and Anarchy (1869) Arnold argues for the “the best that has been thought and said,” insisting that high culture be universally taught — for these are the works in which thinkers and artists create meaning for the rest of us in an otherwise meaningless world.

It’s at the end of “Dover Beach” that Arnold proposes a second way for humans to create meaning in the modern world: romantic love. The parody by the late-twentieth-century American poet Anthony Hecht is too often mentioned. (Just as with the 1970s rock song “Don’t Fear the Reaper” after Saturday Night Live’s comic skit about cowbells, you can’t name “Dover Beach” without some bright spark shouting out the title of Hecht’s “The Dover Bitch.”) Still, Hecht did point toward something genuinely peculiar in Arnold’s poem when he has the woman complain that she has become “a sort of mournful cosmic last resort.”

My sense is that general culture no longer much believes in the power of high art; even the phrase “high art” feels dated, a mockable artifact of a faded elitism. And if my students are any guide, young people these days chortle at the notion that romantic love is salvific, creating meaning in the world.

Still, “Dover Beach” remains powerful, deriving its essential sadness from a sense of something lost — a decent wardrobe that once clothed the world — with only companionship remaining to dress the true nakedness of things. “The Sea of Faith” once girdled creation in meaning, but with faith’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” we can now discern “the vast edges drear / And naked shingles of the world.”

And so, Arnold cries, “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!” The world seems “So various, so beautiful, so new” when wrapped in the meaning that new romantic love creates. But need that love, the world surely does. For reality without meaning is, in truth, indifferent and pointless, with “neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.”

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Dover Beach

by Matthew Arnold

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.
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 Ægean, 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,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

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