Dover Beach Tone

Matthew Arnold’s 1867 poem “Dover Beach” is a five stanza poem with irregular stanza lengths. The stanza lengths go as follows: six, seven, five, eight, and nine lines. This could be significant for the rise and fall climax in the poem. It is unknown to the reader if the narrator of the poem is the author; but it is also unknown whether or not the narrator is male or female. In Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” the narrator makes use of imagery, metaphors, and personification to compare the sea, his loneliness, and his waning faith. By comparing the sea to his loneliness and his waning faith, the narrator is expressing the difficulty of mutual love while also struggling with depression. Matthew Arnold’s uses of imagery help to create the tone

The narrator mentions Sophocles, an ancient Greek Tragedian playwright, having heard [the eternal note of sadness] and that it brought his mind “human misery.” This is significant because there is the comparison between the human mind, ebbing and flowing with misery, and the sea, ebbing and flowing. The human mind and the sea have a multiple similarities like: the ability to have deep, dark places, the ability to be beautiful, and the ability to vast beyond human comprehension, just to name a few. The narrator could feel that the comparison between the human mind and the sea is important because the narrator relates to the sea’s constant changes; and how the narrator’s mood constantly changes because of their depression.

The fourth stanza expresses the narrator’s waning faith by depicting it as once being full, “but now [the narrator] only hear[s]/ its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,/ retreating.” The narrator’s waning faith could be due to their depression overwhelming them; and the narrator feels that they won’t be able to get out of their situation. The quote above is also a case of personification. The narrator is personifying their waning faith as a “withdrawing roar,” which could be like a lion roaring for the last time before giving up on its mission; like the narrator is giving up on their

The narrator wants to escape with this lover to “a land of dreams” that would be so vastly different from the world they currently live in. The beginning of the stanza has a positive tone and seems to be upbeat, however, the lines that follow grow increasingly more dark. The poem concludes with, “Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/ Where ignorant armies clash by night.” This use of imagery could be used for the reason that the mutual lover had left for war and died when two armies clashed at night and the lover died during battle. This could also be the reason that it is the strongest use of imagery throughout the poem. There is another explanation for the tone change in the final stanza of the poem. The tone could have changed from a positive to a negative tone because the lover decides to leave the narrator in the end; and ends up being consumed by their thoughts of depression. Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” is complex and has an underlying theme of depression within the poem. The poem displays the narrator’s internal conflict with their depression and the struggles of maintaining a relationship with a lover. The narrator had four tone changes throughout the poem, which can symbolize the narrator’s quick mood changes that come with their depression. The lover may have not been able to handle the narrator’s constant changes and ends up leaving, which would be why the narrator provides