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Why “Dover Beach” is a Famous Poem
Exploring faith and doubt in Matthew Arnold’s timeless stanzas.
In Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” the timeless conflict between land and sea represents not only Arnold’s individual melancholy over the decline of faith but also the larger human condition: an inability to compromise the transient illusions of imagination with the “grating roar” (l. 9) of reality.
This unresolvable duality manifests itself through the poem’s structure and form, which contrasts each of Arnold’s ephemeral moments of content with the permanent facts of existence. This motif continues through language, which parallels the symbolic clash between land and sea with visual and auditory imagery.
These dualities also have thematic implications in connecting the battles between past and present, war and peace, and land and sea. Overall, “Dover Beach” is an elegy to Arnold’s recognition and disenchanted effort to reconcile the “glimmering and vast” (l. 5) beauty of religion with an increasingly secular, modern world.
The structure
The poem’s four-stanza structure introduces this disenchantment, Arnold’s bittersweet divorce from the world as “a land of dreams.” (l. 31)
