Every writer of different period, pens down for a motive, to fulfill a purpose and nonetheless it has some message to provide about that era. Just as how we get an insight into the hollowness of 14th century by going through Goeffrey Chaucer‘s The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, we get to feel the melancholy state of the victorian writers by going through their works. Tennyson uses myth and imagination to portray his message, on the other hand Matthews Arnold and Robert Browning are some writers who expressed the reality in kind of direct manner in their works.
In Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold not only conveys his feeling of discontent rather he is also more specific in revealing the cause of his sadness. In the poem, he depicts a beautiful picture of the sea only to relate that it reminds him of human suffering. The grating roar of the withdrawing pebbles brings in his mind “The eternal note of sadness in.”
Impact of Advancement
Victorian writers were not against the scientific revolution that were taking place, rather how it drew people apart from eachother. As people were moving towards advancement, it led to the weakening of believe and faith in religion and God. Arnold here deals with the loss of faith and it’s destructive power which makes distance among the common fellow beings.
The waves of the sea are a reminder of the violent and threatening process. In Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold, he uses sea as a metaphor for religious faith. ‘The Sea of Faith’ was once ‘at the full’ but now the poet hears ‘Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’. Arnold laments the loss of religious faith in the present world of scientific discovery and commercial progress. People are living as confused as ‘ignorant armies’ who ‘clash by night’.
According to him, such things led to the devastated state of human being and mankind as people are always in haste running behind the materialistic turned world where they only care about is earning more and more money, leaving them alone among all. There is no joy in them, people cannot see and feel eachothers’ pain and so on.
Hopeful or nostalgic
Victorian writers had a fascination for the classic and so often they seem to get nostalgic about it.
But Arnold did not just express his discontent and note of sadness in Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold, though he gets nostalgic, we find his melancholic state, he is also hopeful at the end on how we can reverse this human condition. It is possible through love and by trusting eachother and one can dare to trust another if one has trust and fears God. Society lacks the religious faith that used to sustain humans in times of trouble. However, people can still find some beauty and comfort in one another.
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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