Compare and Contrast Wordsworths “London 1802” and Arnolds “Dover Beach” as responses to the poets views of their situation

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Compare and Contrast Wordsworths "London 1802" and Arnolds "Dover Beach" as responses to the poets views of their situation

This essay will try to explain and find the comparisons and the contrasting views in Both "London 1802" and "Dover Beach" according to both of the poets views of their situation.

"London 1802" was written by William Wordsworth in September, 1802. It is about Wordsworth saying how he would like England, to revert back to before it was corrupted, because Wordsworth thought that people had lost their inward happiness, which can take many forms, such as religion. They have gained money and wealth in exchange for losing their inward happiness. He talks about people needing to follow after John Milton's character and inspiration. I.e. Living a humble life, in a cheerful manner, and to stop being selfish.

"Dover Beach" was written by Matthew Arnold in the 1840's, early on in the scientific revolution, when the number of actual churchgoers was starting to decrease slightly. The decrease in church attendance is only really noticeable towards the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the 1840's during the beginning of the scientific revolution, where people were starting to disband their religious beliefs, because of the scientific advances which were going on in the British Empire in the nineteenth century, which were enabling proper, scientific explanations for things that were previously usually explained by religion, such as The Creation Theory in the bible which was superceded by the theory of evolution, which Sir Charles Darwin discovered in the nineteenth century.
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Both, "Dover Beach" and "London 1802" were written in the first-half of the nineteenth century, so the subjects that they are writing the poems about should be similar, which they are, so they are good poems to compare and contrast for this reason.

Both of these poems are about how gloomy the worlds around the poets themselves are. For example in "London 1802", when Wordsworth is talking about the state of England in the nineteenth century,

"England hath need of thee; she is a fen

Of stagnant waters; altar, sword, and pen"

Here, Wordsworth ...

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