Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach

The Victorian era of England was a monumental time of change in all aspects of life, from scientific revolutions from minds such as Charles Darwin to the tremendous strides in technology that began the industrial revolution. Matthew Arnold, a famous poet of the Victorian era, laments these changes of society and their effects on the religious community in his renowned poem, Dover Beach, through his use of eloquent imagery to create a magnificent scene of the sublime ocean and powerful metaphors displaying the receding influence of faith on the world, combined with an extremely strong allusion and frequent enjambment to show how in these spiritually hollowed times the only comfort we can find is within one another. The first stanza, just as the entirety of the poem, does not follow any meter or set rhythm and contains an unusually inconsistent rhyming scheme, which serves to mimic the erratic yet calming rhythm of the sea’s waves upon the shore. This similarity between the structure and the pulse of the waves significantly strengthens the already incredible imagery featured in this stanza. Vivid phrases such as “Glimmering and vast” and “moon-blanched land” immediately immerses the reader in a serene nighttime landscape. This immersion is also reinforced by Arnold’s deliberate use of second person by directly …show more content…
He starts off by addressing his love (The individual looking over the landscape with him) “let us be true/To one another!”, which adds to his theme of the miserable earth by suggesting we fill the void it leaves in the solace of others. He then uses a strong anaphoric phrase by listing that the world “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain” in order to exhibit the unquestionable requirement that we seek comfort in one other to occupy the space left by the diminishing quantity of faith in the