In the second stanza we immediately experience a tonal shift, especially in the way Arnold presents the sea. The Greek author Sophocles' idea of "the turbid ebb and flow of human misery" is introduced. We can establish that a contrast is formed to the scenery of the previous stanza. Although there is a distance in time and space: "Aegean", "northern sea", the general feeling of suspicion remains.
In the third stanza, Matthew Arnold describes the “sea of faith” as the divine protection of religious devotion, as an encircling “bright girdle furl'd” that is now retreating previous to human reason. The "Sea of Faith", which is a metaphor representing the Middle Ages, when religion could still be practiced without the concerns and distrust that the modern ages brought. The poem represents the époque when religion was still intact, by representing how the world was dressed, "like the folds of a bright girdle furled", and comparing it to when this faith is gone, "The vast edges drear/and naked shingles of the world".
The final stanza of the poem commences with an oath by Arnold, he asks his wife to be "true", to him. "Ah, love, let us be true, to one another!". However, as he keeps emphasizing his contradictions, he conveys an idea that his world does not have any basic human ethics. It seems as if they should be true to one another as the world can be compared to a land of dreams; which might emerge as being beautiful and new but actually has no faith, love or joy. Also, he refers to a place where “ignorant armies clash by night”, we may deduce that he is foreboding that faith carries with it ‘faith, love and joy’, but that without it there can only be ignorance, confusion and gloom.
Matthew Arnold’s emotional response prefigures through the stanzas like a poetic praise and bewail for the future of mankind in a world where there is no religion, no belief or faith in itself. The only magnificence of the Dover Beach that Matthew Arnold portrays is of no use at all, serving only as a brief, temporary triumph that soon tumbles down into a menacing melancholy of the realizing that none of the emotion he finds in the landscape is real. To Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach is nothing more than his own creativity and thoughts, of what a perfect world with faith would be like; it is only there to serve the purpose of his own imagination.
