❐ Attempt a critical estimate of the poem Dover Beach.
= Dover Beach has its striking similarities with Arnold's other poems - Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse and The Buried Life. The general decline of faith and Arnold's own resultant bewilderment and melancholy constitute the theme of the former. In The The Buried Life, Arnold expresses the belief that in a successful love-relationship he may discover certain values which are not readily to be found in 'modern life.' Both of these ideas recur in Dover Beach. Dover Beach has also its thematic semblance with Eliot's Preludes. In Preludes the poet looks at the modern life but finds it to his dismay not only materialistic and spiritually barren but also finds it decayed and empty. The scene around him evokes no zest. However it reminds him of something infinitely gentle and infinitely suffering. But he is finally appalled by life's emptiness. Dover Beach centres on the theme that there was a time when men were firm believers in God. But now they have become materialistic, ungodly and sceptical. They do not know what they fight for, what they strive after.
The poem opens with the description of a symbolic landscape. The landscape is composed of details which suggest the serenity, balance, and stability which Arnold desired for himself. The setting is evoked with considerable vividness :
"The sea is clam to-night,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the Straits; - on the French coast, the light
Gleams, and he is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast; out in the tranquil bay.
... ... ... ... sweet is the night air !
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen ! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
The image, observes J.D. Jump, which dominates this first paragraph of Dover Beach forms part of the 'full view' described by Mr. W.H. Auden in his poem beginning, 'Look, stranger, on this island now.' Like Arnold, Mr. Auden appears in his poetry as a tortured intellectual concerned with working out his own salvation. Mr. Auden is a highly subjective poet; and like Arden he tends to relate his mental states to symbolic landscapes. But, whereas Arnold's more successful landscapes seem to be apprehended by direct sensory experiences, Mr. Auden's consist largely of items culled from atlases, news reels, the daily press, and political, psychological, and other reading. In short, his characteristic landscapes appear to be known to the intelligence rather than to the senses. But Mr. Auden's early favourite landscape of industrial decay is sometimes rendered in potently sensuous terms ; but this is unusual. In the poem beginning, 'Look, Stranger, on this island now,' Mr. Auden further, observes J.D. Jump, seems to have made the unusual effort to impose the landscape he is describing upon the very senses of his readers. The second stanza of the said poem is all that concerns us now :
"Here at the small field's ending pause
When the chalk walk falls to the foam and its tall ledges
Oppose the pluck
And knock of the tide,
And the shingle scrambles after the sucking-surf
And the gull lodges
A moment on its sheer side.
The poem is remarkable for its imageries. The faith in religion is compared to a sea. The sea of religious faith was once at full tide :
"The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.'
The image of the battle-field becomes the poet's most memorable poetic comment on the modern world. Nothing that he says of 'this strange disease of modern life' in The Scholar Gipsy approaches it in urgency and inherent power :
"And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
The poem has handed to us some memorable phrases like 'moon-blanch'd land, grating roar, tremulous cadence slow, turbid ebb and low, darkling plain, etc. All these are apt enough to convey the sense to the readers. Sometimes a blending of vowels and consonants creates a romance of orchestral harmonies in the poem.
Dover Beach strikes a modern note. It represents 'the main movement of mind of the last quarter of century', the vision of the tragic and alienated condition of man. In this sense Arnold may be called a modern poet.'