Dover Beach is located in England, on the eastern shores near France. It is also the setting, and title of a poem written by a well educated man named Matthew Arnold, who is well known as the first modern critic of poetry. According to an article in The Literary Encyclopedia, Arnold was a very spiritual person, but claimed poetry prevailed over philosophy, science, and religion, due to the principle that those things are based on facts, which can be proven wrong over time. The article also said he believed poetry is an expression based on ideas, and ideas, which are faith, cannot be proven wrong. He was quoted by The Literary Encyclopedia as saying that poetry is "the breath and finer spirit of knowledge."
In 1867 Arnold wrote his most famous poem "Dover Beach." It was written only a few weeks after he was married and I believe it was addressed to his wife. Arnold probably composed the poem while sitting on Dover Beach looking out into the sea with pebbles smothering the shore. The poem is about his struggle with life, love, and faith in religion. He is more or less telling a story, and trying to talk to his wife about their
relationship and how he thinks love should be, using the sea and the waves to aid in his descriptions. He also uses the tide as an allusion for faith, revealing that in this period of time it was constantly changing; therefore faith alone isn't enough to complete our lives. He suggests that love be our strength and guiding light throughout our lives.
Arnold uses metaphor, and imagery throughout the poem to convey his feeling to the reader. The author begins the poem with a very peaceful tone, "the sea is calm tonight, the tide is full, the moon lies fair upon the sraights..." (1-3) With this passa...
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...out love and the wife of Matthew Arnold, or whether I think of it as a poem indicating the on going religious predicament of that time period, it remains a poem explaining a struggle worth fighting for what you believe
in, and the trials and tribulations that come with it. In the end, the only person you can count on is yourself and the one you love.
Works Cited
Arnold, Matthew. "Dover Beach." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction,
Poetry, and Drama. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 4th compact
ed. New York: Longman, 2005. 774.
Literature, Matthew Arnold. Literary Encyclopedia Online. 2004. Jennifer
Wallace, University of Cambridbe. 12 October 2004.
http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php'[
Section One - On the Beach Question 1: At the beginning Moira Davidson drinks a lot of Alcohol (alcohol). She is sad and angry because she can’t understand why the Australians have to pay for other people’s faults. John Osborne blames Moira to drink (for drinking?) too much to escape from reality.
Understanding poetry as a criticism of life, Arnold uses it as his platform to wage a battle against the personal havoc that was wrought by the new age. Thus, Arnold captures the essence of the Victorian Era through his poetry by addressing the intellectual concerns of his time, especially about religion, science, and the inner turmoil that believing in the two caused.
In this poem, the author tells of a lost love. In order to convey his overwhelming feelings, Heaney tries to describe his emotions through something familiar to everyone. He uses the sea as a metaphor for love, and is able to carry this metaphor throughout the poem. The metaphor is constructed of both obvious and connotative diction, which connect the sea and the emotions of love.
One of the ways Fahrenheit 451 can be related to Arnold’s Dover Beach is by connecting the absense of true love in both of them. Throughout the book, Montag slowly realizes that he does not truly love his wife Mildred. In the beginning, Montag believes that he truly loves Mildred. However, as the book goes on, he meets Clarisse, and begins to change his way of thought. He slowly begins to wake up from the dream world that he is living in. As he begins to know Clarisse, he slowly realizes that Mildred does not share the same deep passion for life that he does. At the beginning of the Sieve and the Sand, Montag frantically reads books to gain more knowledge. Mildred complains and kicks the books around, showing that her and her husband are growing apart. At the end of the book, Montag is talking to Granger, and says "... Even if she dies, I realized a moment ago, I don't think I'll feel sad (155)". This shows that Montag does not care for his wife as much as he thought he did before. In the poem, Arnold states "…a land of dreams ...hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light". The world in Arnold’s poem is a land of dreaming. While people are dreaming of true love and joy, there is none in the real world that you live in once you wake up from the dream. Once the “confused alarms of struggle and flight” wake you up, you realize that the world is really void of love and happiness. The world in Arnold's poem is a world parallel to that of Bradbury's: Both are worlds that do not contain love or light, as much as people in them would like to believe otherwise.
Why did Ray Bradbury choose the poem “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold? Ray Bradbury chose the poem “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold, because at the time when Guy Montag reads it, he is questioning his faith similarly to Matthew Arnold. Also, the poem “Dover Beach” expresses Fahrenheit 451 Guy Montag’s sadness and unhappiness with the world. Lastly, this poem represents the loss of love, and hopelessness that Montag feels.
Matthew Arnold begins his poem by describing a calm, beautiful scene. Dover Beach is lying "fair" in the moonlight. It is high tide and he sees the coast of France and "the cliffs of England... / Gleaming and vast, out in the tranquil bay." All seems lovely and quiet. According to Baum's research on the date and circumstances of the poem, Arnold is probably speaking to his new bride (86) as he says, "Come to the window, sweet is the night-air." But gradually the reader senses a shifting of mood and tone. Now he describes the "line of spray... / Where the sea meets" the land as "moon-blanched." And the tide, tossing pebbles as it comes, is a "grating roar" with a "tremulous cadence slow" that "bring[s] / The eternal note of sadness in." This melancholy mood grows deeper as he thinks of man's long span of history-- "The turbid ebb and flow / of human misery."
“Dover Beach” talks about a man's attitude toward life. Arnold uses diction to show his feelings and inner most thoughts. In “Dover Beach” he claims “the sea is calm tonight, the tide is full, the moon lies fair upon the straits.” These lines show a sense of clarification until he claims he has lost his faith by saying “and we are here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight.” These lines present the idea of him not knowing why he is on this earth. His negative thoughts affect his being able to be happy for example when he says “Ah, love, let us be true to one another! for the world which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams…” He is starting with a positive note with being true to one another but then interrupts with the artificialness of the world. Arnold also uses diction to describe the negative qualities of the world by saying “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain..” Arnold uses imagery in the first stanza when observing the sea and the moon. This helps the reader picture moonlit water and listening to the sound of the waves crashing. Starting off with a very peaceful scene, we drift off comparing the crashing of the waves to the loss of faith our generations have experienced. The end of the poem leaves the reader questioning if the world is not here for us who is? The world is filled with different kinds of people and with different stories to share but for some reason we don’t share with each other. We keep all of our emotions and stories inside of our buried life while we put on an act ...
The. Throughout this poem, Arnold mentions all of these traits and ties them all. together. We are all a & nbsp; The irony in this poem is the main plot of the poem. A man has taken a woman to a beautiful beach in France. There they look over the cliffs at the beautiful ocean, the moon is full and bright, and the night air is calm and peaceful. She thinks that she is going to this romantic place to be wooed by this man. Instead he turns to her and talks to her about Sophocles. She, not. understanding what exactly is going on, later realizes that he was getting to. the point of having each other and always being there for one another. & nbsp; The poet uses visual and auditory images to mainly help the romantic fantasy-like place. “The sea is calm, the tide is full” and “Of pebbles”.
Relief,” Millay used a similar form of imagery to describe the rain that resulted in the remembrance of the persona’s love: “…I miss him in the weeping of the rain…” (Millay, 3). This description of the rain not only helped better visualize the rain itself, but also emphasized the sorrowful and desolate undertone of the poem. Another exemplification of visual imagery utilized in Millay’s poem was used to illustrate the tides: “…I want him at the shrinking of the tide…” (Millay, 4). The retreating of the tides was easily concei...
Arnold's pessimism regarding aging leaves no room for optimism. The reader encounters this negativity right away, for in the first stanza Arnold ascertains, in answer to his question "What is it to grow old?", that aging involves "[losing] the glory of the form." The words "lose the glory" implicate a tragic and perhaps humiliating experience. Furthermore, Arnold describes the loss of "the glory of the form" as a time when "beauty [forgoes] her wreath," a phrase which presents the reader with the image of a queen abandoning her crown, as her time of glory ends forever. Arnold gives the reader another foreboding image of aging in line twenty-four, when he describes himself as being incarcerated by his age with the image of the "hot prison of the present, month to month with weary pain." The words "hot", "weary", "prison", and "pain" effectively portray Arnold's suffering and discomfort to the reader, simultaneously lending to his overall pessimistic standpoint. In addition, Arnold experiences an absense of feeling in accordance with his age. In the fourth stanza he declares that old age dies not imply gazing down on the world with "rapt prophetic eyes" and a "heart profoundly stirred/ to weep and feel the fullness of the past." Furthermore, he writes, "Deep in our hidden heart/ Festers the dull remembrance of a change/ But no emotion--none." One critic concurs, stating that Arnold's age induces an "emotional frigidity" (Madden 115). Another critic describes Arnold as having an "incapacity for feeling" (Bush 50). As to the "dull remembrance of a change" Madden adds, "There was always the memory of that 'different world' [which Arnold] had once known..." (115). Most probably, the "different world" of which Madden speaks is Arnold's youth, of which the poet only has a "dull remembrance" left, suggesting that Arnold finds no fulfillment or feeling in the memories of his youth.
Robert Browning's poem "Meeting at Night" is essentially a narrative of a man who is journeying to meet his lover. The man recounts his journey as he undertakes it, mentioning or observing different portions of the trip, each in turn. One by one, he briefly describes his surroundings as he passes by them, merely noting them as if they bear only fleeting significance to him. However, although his descriptions are unpretentious and abruptly forgotten as he continues onward toward his goal, each line of the poem contains striking imagery. In fact, it should be noted that this poem consists entirely of imagery. Every line depicts a scene of the landscape that Browning's narrator encounters; that is, at least, until he finally reaches his destination, when his focus is diverted to his lover. Throughout the entire poem he offers no personal insight or reflection on his situation, and he instead is content to merely report his perceptions and observations as they come and go. Although each of these little vignettes is of seemingly small consequence in itself, these individual images are each portrayed with remarkable style and feeling, and Browning skillfully strings these images together to elicit specific feelings and reactions from his readers. His masterful application of imagery, mood, and dynamic movement serve to shape the poem's emotion in such a way that the reader can tap into a plentiful well of information pertaining to the state of the speaker and his emotions -- information that initially goes unnoticed from a strictly literal observation.
In “Dover Beach”, Arnold uses an exquisitely calm ocean filled with tension to present a position of appearance verses reality. “Dover Beach” is about a beautifully calm sea, although when looking underneath the surface, it is a world full of hidden turbu...
A Comparison of Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold and Prayer Before Brith by Louis MacNeice
In this piece of literature, there is a boy and a girl who are absolutely infatuated by each other, and feel as if they could spend the rest of their lives together at that location. When the author says, “In a kingdom by the sea” (Poe 2), I immediately think of a gloomy beach. In my mind I see the couple on a beach with an unmoving ocean to one side, and flat landsc...
She says “writing can be an expression of one 's innermost feelings. It can allow the reader to tap into the deepest recesses of one 's heart and soul. It is indeed the gifted author that can cause the reader to cry at her words and feel hope within the same poem. Many authors as well, as ordinary people use writing as a way to release emotions.” She makes plenty points in her review that I completely agree with. After reading the poem I think that Elizabeth Barret Browning is not only the author of her famous poem, but also the speaker as well. She is a woman simply expressing her love for her husband in a passionate way through poetry. In the 1st Line it reads “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” A woman drunk in love she is, and next she begins to count the numerous ways she can love her significant