Matthew Arnolds Dover Beach Essay example -- Poem Poetry Essays

Matthew Arnolds capital of Delaware Beach Great works of poetry convey a feeling, mood, or meaning that affects the reader on an emotional, personal level. Great works of poetry can do that -- translate a misprint story/theme -- but masterpieces, the like Matthew Arnolds Dover Beach, are a double-edged sword, containing a second, figurative theme -- a message between the lines and underneath the obvious. Not only is Matthew Arnolds 1867 verse, Dover Beach, a unique and beautiful literary work describing a lovers longing for trust and faith, but on a figurative plain it also stands as a metaphor for that constant evil called war. Literally, Dover Beach flows through four irregularly rhymed sections that increase in emotional impact and describe a lovers need for faithfulness in an otherwise dark and unfaithful world. In this traditional sense, the narrator of Dover Beach is either a man or woman standing at a window wearily reflecting on the world while staring at the bea uty of the night coast. In the starting section (Arnolds poem is very prose-like in its lack of a distinct structure or rhyme scheme, sputtering through the first nine lines in an abacdbdce rhyme scheme), the lover declares that The sea is calm tonight. The poem continues with simple imagery of the atmosphere, describing the full tide, the moon, the beaches of Dover, the night air, the waves, all of which we presume are viewable from the narrators window. The scene is cemented a moon-bathed beach, the waves drawing back, only to crash back in a grating roar of pebbles. The eternal note of sadness is set as the lover begins to interrogative the beauty he sees and the love he longs to keep. The next two sections of Dover Beach describe a w... ...re ignorant armies clash by night. Whether Arnold intends to imply that these things were dispatch and driven from the world by war or that they never even existed in the first place is left to the readers to decide for themselves . On a traditional, literal level, Matthew Arnolds poem, Dover Beach, is a vivid voice praying for faithful love in a beautiful yet evil and faithless world, but figuratively, the poem is a metaphor for the cycle of war and the darkness it brings to the world. The waves represent the battles, the pebbles the innocent people flung about by their power, and that note of despair present throughout the entire poem hints at no possible end for weary romantics like the poems narrator. Crying both for the endurance of love and an end to war at the same time, Dover Beach stands as a poetic masterpiece of one eternal note sadness.