Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold (1822- 1888)
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
| The fourth stanza sums up the entire poem. In lines twenty-nine
and thirty, the man asks for his lover to be true and faithful in their
relationship. Throughout the poem the man talks about how his religious
faith has left him through Arnold's usage of symbolism. After having this
new revelation about religion he searches for a resolution, and finds that
the faithful love of friends can replace that between man and God. So therefore
he says, "Ah, love, lets us be true/ To one another!"(29-30).
|
| Arnold must have decided that loving someone truly remained the
only alternative to a world that gives us "neither joy, nor love, nor light,
/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain,". For in this poem Arnold
seems to be portraying his religious feelings through the man and poem
itself. By taking these vows of faithfulness, the lovers are able to offset
the loss of religious faith in the world to some extent.
|
| Line thirty-six states that the lovers are "on a darkling plain",
and in the center of a world that is sometimes unpredictable and dark.
When religious faith has left you in a place of darkness, it is easy to
fight friends instead of foes. Unusual things occur when the world is in
disarray, and the importance of being faithful to each other is of even
greater importance. The last line of the poem refers to a passage in Thukydides,
The Battle of Epipolae, where in a night encounter Athenian warriors killed
friend and enemy alike. Arnold uses this allusion to point out that people
are ignorant when lost in the darkness of a world without faith, and it
is important to be true to one another.
|
| The repetition of neither and nor in this stanza produces a series
of denials, for "…neither joy, nor love, nor light/ Nor certitude, nor
peace, nor help for pain;"(33-34). If none of these basic human values
exist, it raises the question of what remains at all? Arnold's usage of
these words provides us with a very depressing image of the world. Of course
this is exactly how someone of his time may have felt. When the Darwin's
theory was released and religion was question, many people were left feeling
empty. Throughout the poem Arnold uses caesuras end stopped rhymes, help
to promote the importance of certain lines.
|
| Line thirty holds a caesura with a pause after "To one another!", which emphasizes the entire idea of letting the lovers be true to one another. Then the semicolon at the end of line thirty-four provides the reader with a break form the repetition of nor before it. The poem then continues to a new idea. The last stanza also emulates a octave of a sonnet, but closes with a single concluding line instead of a full sestet. The rhyme scheme of this ending stanza follows abbacddcc. The exact prosody of the fourth stanza is a little unclear, yet seems to follow some sort of iambic pattern. The key to the fourth stanza remains the man's request for the lovers to be true and faithful to one another in a world that has lost its religious faith. |
|
|
|
|
|