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Essay on dover beach by matthew arnold
Depiction of Victorian age in literature
Depiction of Victorian age in literature
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Perceptions in Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold’s “Dover beach” describe the way in which perceptions are mislead society. The use of metaphors, symbolisms, allusiveness, technical quantities, and imagery assist the speaker’s thought regards between what is seen and what is real. Dover beach was written during Victorian era. Which brought civilization based on industry, value and money. This is the time which people start questioning the existence of God. The speaker observed the plight of Victorian era. And he sought an answer to the problems which he and world faced with. Arnold express the dejection of lost civilization, anticipate its future, and try to acquire its solution
The speaker begins straightway with visual and auditory imagery when describing “ the sea is calm”. This image implies that there is a life out there but it is smothered by darkness. And the cliff is sparkling in the moonlight. The speaker invite his companion to “come to the window” (line6) to see the night air. He says this as the unending wave come in and go out back out again. His emotion bring feeling of sorrow. The speaker says even Sophocles a great Greek philosopher of the past heard his eternal sadness. The sea is coming in and going out. He thought of its like the struggles with life constant demand. The uses of metaphor when he call the faith of all people “ the faith of the sea”(21). He says the world used to be full of faith. But now the speaker no longer believes that the world is in full of faith. He hear the wave but he only feels sorrow. So he need his loves’ for reassurance that everything will be all right, that he can trust her completely. However the tone underneath prevent hem to believed that. The poet is comparing the world in which we live to the perfect life we want to have. Finally the speaker says with out peace, love, and joy the world contain no goodness and uncertainty. Since we have no faith in God, we must have each other with war and darkness approaching. The theme that you must have faith in someone if not in God to help deal with the difficulties our world can create.
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...
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...man did not, as the churches claimed, have a privileged place if earthly creation, as the image of God, but was merely part of an age-old biological process of the survival of the fittest. Rather than being a little lower than the angels, man was somewhat more developed than the ape. The theory was devastating and destroyed the Christian vocations of many. Perhaps the best way for the modern reader to gain some sense of the impact of this experience is to go to the poetry that grew out of the loss of religious belief
Arnold’s plead is also his solution to a world of confusion and chaos. he believes, or optimistically wishes he could believe, that he can take refuge in an internal peace between him and his lover. By saying this, Arnold must believe there is no hope for civilization, and no solution to its problems. On a darkened plain the people cannot truly see what is going on, which draws back to Arnold’s idea that people of the Victorian Age acted without reflection. The darkness is caused by a chaotic world where truth is blind to those who look on it, and the people who look upon the world do not reflect on what they see. Thus, the darkness is attributed to confusion
This essay is anchored on the goal of looking closer and scrutinizing the said poem. It is divided into subheadings for the discussion of the analysis of each of the poem’s stanzas.
“I had been born into a raging ocean where I swam relentlessly, flailing my arms in hope of rescue, of reaching a shoreline I never sighted. Never solid ground beneath me, never a resting place. I had lived with only the desperate hope to stay afloat; that and nothing more. But when at last I wrote my first words in the page, I felt an island rising beneath my feet like the back of a whale”.
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.
In her narrative essay, “FYB”, Zadie Smith expresses her belief that if one redirects their mindset to a more limited perspective and uses the limitless Manhattan mentality at certain times, one can arrive at their beach. A beach is a mentality, and Smith finds her beach by coming to peace with Manhattan’s beach. The idea of a person’s “beach” being hard to discover may be observed through Smith’s personal background, as it is almost mythical for this English writer living in Soho, Manhattan to come by a beach.
The juxtaposition of the Titanic and the environment in the first five stanzas symbolizes the opposition between man and nature, suggesting that nature overcomes man. The speaker characterizes the sea as being “deep from human vanity” (2) and deep from the “Pride of Life that planned” the Titanic. The diction of “human vanity” (2) suggests that the sea is incorruptible by men and then the speaker’s juxtaposition of vanity with “the
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.
The repetition of sound causes different feelings of uncertainty and fear as the reader delves deeper into the poem. “Moss of bryozoans/blurred, obscured her/metal...” (Hayden 3). The r’s that are repeated in blurred and obscured create a sense of fogginess of the darkness of the water that the speaker is experiencing. The fogginess is a sense of repression, which is attempting its way out of the mind to the conscious. Hayden continues the use of alliteration with F and S sounds. Although they are different letters they produce the same sound that causes confusion, but an acceptance of death. “Yet in languid/frenzy strove, as/one freezing fights off/sleep desiring sleep;/strove against/ the canceling arms that/suddenly surrounded/me...” (Hayden 4). The use of sound at the last six lines of the poem causes the reader to feel the need for air and the fear of death. “Reflex of life-wish?/Respirators brittle/belling? Swam from/the ship somehow; /somehow began the/measured rise” (Hayden 4). The R sounds that begin is the swimming through the water. The B sound that continues right after in “brittle belling” is the gasp of air, and finally, the S sounds that finish the line by creating a soft feeling. As if the reader might not get out in time, even though the lines are saying that the speaker does escape the ship. The fear the alliteration evokes from the reader is the unconscious. The deep inner thoughts that no one wants to tap into. The speaker is accepting the idea of death in the ocean through his unconscious, but his conscious mind is trying to push back and begin the “measured rise” (Hayden 4) back to the
The smell of the restaurants faded and the new, refreshing aroma of the sea salt in the air took over. The sun’s warmth on my skin and the constant breeze was a familiar feeling that I loved every single time we came to the beach. I remember the first time we came to the beach. I was only nine years old. The white sand amazed me because it looked like a wavy blanket of snow, but was misleading because it was scorching hot. The water shone green like an emerald, it was content. By this I mean that the waves were weak enough to stand through as they rushed over me. There was no sense of fear of being drug out to sea like a shipwrecked sailor. Knowing all this now I knew exactly how to approach the beach. Wear my sandals as long as I could and lay spread out my towel without hesitation. Then I’d jump in the water to coat myself in a moist protective layer before returning to my now slightly less hot towel. In the water it was a completely different world. While trying to avoid the occasional passing jellyfish, it was an experience of
Each stage of Arnold Friend’s unmasking and Connie’s resulting terror and growing hysteria is carefully delineated. When Arnold first arrives, Connie cannot decide “if she liked him or if he was just a jerk.” The reader becomes more suspicious than she does as she notices his muscular neck and arms, his “nose long and hawk-like, sniffing as if she were a treat he was going to gobble up and it was all a joke.” Gradually, Connie realizes that all the characteristics she “recognizes” in him dress, gestures, the “singsong way he talked” do not come together the way
Through metaphors, the speaker proclaims of her longing to be one with the sea. As she notices The mermaids in the basement,(3) and frigates- in the upper floor,(5) it seems as though she is associating these particular daydreams with her house. She becomes entranced with these spectacles and starts to contemplate suicide.
The author conveys Arnold as the opposing force to Connie’s child-like fantasy world. Arnold knows that he can take advantage of Connie and corrupt her world easily, and nothing is going to stop him from doing so. He is a predator and is determined to lure Connie over…even if it means by force. Everything about the way Arnold looks and acts represents his shady and dark persona. Arnold’s hair is “shaggy, shabby black hair that looked crazy as a wig” (366). His hair is the contrast to Connie’s golden blonde hair which symbolizes innocence. Oates describes Arnold’s hair as looking like a wig. This represents a sort of fake cover-up on Arnold’s behalf. Arnold’s sunglasses serve as another symbol. His sunglasses reflect mirror images and do not show his eyes. This symbolizes a disguise, as if Arnold is trying to hide who he really is. Arnold’s car is an extension of himself. It serves as a contrast between who Arnold really is and who he is disguised as. The car symbolizes the fantasy and reality aspect of Arnold. Oates uses the old jalopy to symbolize the reality of Arnold, and the new paint job is used to symbolize Arnold’s fake disguise that he puts on to lure Connie in. Arnold’s car becomes an example of all that is dark about his appearance and nature. The color gold represents a sort of flashy aura as if he is trying to attract a younger crowd. The saying “Man the Flying Saucers” is written on the
There is also a sense of acuteness as the words in this stanza are short and sharp, and the lines clash and seem to contrast greatly. " Whispering by the shore" shows that water is a symbol of continuity as it occurs in a natural cycle, but the whispering could also be the sound of the sea as it travels up the shore. The end of this section makes me feel as if he is trying to preserve something with the "river mud" and "glazing the baked clay floor. " The fourth section, which includes four stanzas of three lines, whereas the third section included four-line stanzas and the second section included two-line stanzas, shows continuity once again, as if it's portraying the water's movement. "Moyola" is once again repeated, and "music" is also present, with "its own score and consort" being musical terms and giving the effect of harmony.
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...
In the first book of the Old Testament, Genesis, we read of the fall of man. As we study the Bible and recognize it’s importance in our lives today we must realize the role these stories play in our time. The Bible is not simply a history book or a book of stories of morality, but it is a book that speaks to us today of how we should live and interact with God. We are confronted with this fact in Genesis “through a graphic and dramatic representation it gives a
This poem also grasps the concept of religion and how it plays a role in this work. The character sets himself on religion and makes that as his "sanctuary" from the sea. "Thus the joys of God are fervent wit...