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…