Cliffs of Dover

Dover Beach is a poem that is to be presented as a dramatic monologue. It is divided into four distinct thematic sections, each of which uses the previous stanza to build its own message. The first stanza is the first section, of course. This stanza describes the scene that the speaker sees, but offers little deeper meaning. It simply describes first of the farthest images (“the French coast”) and last the closest images (“the pebbles which the waves draw back”). This section does little more than paint pictures in the readers’ minds with use of connotative language, and it is not until the very last two lines (“bring the eternal note of sadness in”) that we can posit the presences of a deeper significance behind Arnold’s words. This contrast becomes the key to the poem.

Once the speaker has described the physical world that his eyes see, the poem moves to what is inside the speaker’s mind. The flow of description comes closer and closer to the speaker’s core. The second stanzas reference to Sophocles suggests the speaker’s inner musings about the sound of the sea and the history and ramifications of this sound.

The third section builds upon the image of Sophocles by showing that is was not just long-dead Sophocles who was aware of the melancholy truth of the sea, but also the reader. The sound of the sea and his musings over Sophocles lead him to realize that yes, indeed, the scene before him is not beautiful and peaceful, but sad and painful. The image of the night-time beach comes to represent a dreary, lonely, pointless existence. The perpetual beating of the waves of the beach makes man’s short existence seem inconsequential.

The fourth section of the poem contains the true point of the poem: that love is the only thing that gives life meaning. In lines thirty-one through thirty-three, the speaker pronounces that the world only seems like a nice place, but in fact offers up none of the comforts that humans seek: joy, love, light, certitude, peace, and help for pain. Arnold emphasizes the world’s lack of these qualities by repetition of the word “nor” in line 34. The speaker is imploring his lover (the supposed audience of the poem) to continue loving him as he loves her, for with a lack of their mutual love, life is unlivable.

The view presented at the end of the poem seems to clash with the image set out in the first stanza of the poem. The poem opens up with an idyllic and romantic description of Dover Beach and, by extension, the beauty of the world; however, it ends with the succinct observation that the world sucks and the people that live it in whom you actually care about are the only reason to continue living. This could possibly be considered a love poem, but the overall tone of the verses is one of sadness, melancholy, hopelessness, and loss of faith.

The first stanza of the poem suggests a sonnet. It is divided into an octave, then a sestet with a turn at line nine. The rhyme scheme is not correct though, nor is the meter, and the tone of the poem is not that of a typical sonnet, but Arnold’s intent to create the initial feeling of a romantic poem is unmistakable. But then the poem dives straight into melancholic images mixed with classical allusions to “Sophocles” and “ignorant armies.” The poem’s tone slowly changes from peacefully romantic to sad and melancholic, but seems to switch back to romanticism at the top of the fourth stanza (“Ah, love, let us be true to one another!” line 29) but this is yet another set up for a depressing observation that the world seems nice but is actually just cold and unfeeling and unsympathetic to human feelings.

The last stanza’s assertion of the world’s disappointments is anti-romantic. Instead of glorifying nature’s beauty and expounding on its enthralling abilities, Arnold tells us that humans may find no solace in the natural world, for it is an immortal, unfeeling machine which has not changed since the time of Sophocles.

The poem is designed to trick up the reader. The introduction makes the permanence of nature seem as though it were one of its comforting aspects, but by the end of the poem we learn that it’s permanence is exactly what makes it unfeeling and uncomforting. Love is what human’s really need, for is it human and sympathetic. Arnold is essentially criticizing the human condition.(776)