Andrew's Wiki
Arnold Poems

Dover Beach

• First three lines lap like waves: 6, 8, and 10 lines long
• First stanza sonnet length
• Waves going back and forth bring in thoughts, universally and historically too, “the eternal note of sadness” (Sophocles on the Aegean..”
• The Sea of Faith is receding, not at full tide
  • In the vacuum of the loss of religious faith, you must be faithful to one another: personal relationships must give the “faith” given by religion before
  • The beautiful world that seems to new is just a “land of dreams”
• “And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
  • We are fighting for we know not what: we don’t know what’s going to happen after we die; we don’t know what to struggle for; what to value; we fight w/out a perspective, a view
  • Compared with the pretty view of French shore from Dover
  • Religion was like a “girdle,” a covering, but now we’re naked, the beach is naked

“To Marguerite”

• A companion piece to Dover Beach, a cynical one where even faithfulness isn’t an option because she doesn’t return his love for him. If you put the two poems together, you have a crisis.
• He waited 15 years to publish it