Dark Dover Beach - review

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Dark Dover Beach

By: Emmanuel Perez

For: Aurora Flewwelling-Skup

Date: 12/11/2003

Despair and disillusionment towards the notion of religion is what "Dover Beach" ultimately comes down to. The narrator, which we do not know if it's a man or a woman (although we will assume is a man), comes to the disheartening realization that not everything is what it seems to be, and that his religious beliefs, for one, are something that cannot be counted on anymore. From now on, his loved one's faithfulness is all that he has left to cling onto, or at least that is what he counts on, hopes and implores for. We are first transported to Dover Beach, as if we were there, with him, looking through that window, observing the sea, calm at first. The speaker then calls on his companion (of which we can't, again, be certain of its sex, although we will assume it is woman) to look out through the window and listen, as the sea becomes agitated. He then proceeds to recall how Sophocles, the Greek dramatist, had also witnessed, long ago, the same scenery, "on the Aegean", and thus heard the same sounds of a troubled sea, the waves crashing onto the shore, slowly, back and forth: "It brought into his mind the turbid ebb and flow of human misery." The narrator then theorizes about the "Sea of Faith" and its retreating tide, to finally conclude with a plea for love and peace. The prosaic, lyrical style through which Matthew Arnold composes this poem enables him to make judicious use of language to set the tone. He continuously uses phrases such as "tremulous cadence" and "note of sadness" to establish a certain gloominess, for example. He also makes a very artistic use of asymmetry, it seems, to recreate somewhat of a movement of the tide. Metaphors occupy a large part of this well-known poem, and it is through those metaphors, and imageries, that we come to grasp the link Matthew Arnold is trying to make between religion, nature, and love.
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The first half of "Dover Beach's" first stanza depicts an appeasing and soothing landscape, that of a calm sea, over which "the moon lies fair...The cliffs of England stand, glimmering and vast." In the second half, turmoil starts setting in, the atmosphere shifting moods abruptly, as the water begins to stir up, sending its waves colliding against the shore, contrasting with the stability and dependability of the calm sea and "tranquil bay": "Listen! You hear the grating roar of pebbles which the waves draw back..." After soliciting our visual thoughts, our aural sense is now titillated. This appeal ...

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