1. dover beach
The sea is calm to-night.
The Sea of Faith
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
But now I only hear
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Retreating, to the breath
Only, from the long line of spray
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
And naked shingles of the world.
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand, Ah, love, let us be true
Begin, and cease, and then again begin, To one another! for the world, which seems
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring To lie before us like a land of dreams,
The eternal note of sadness in. So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Sophocles long ago
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Of human misery; we
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
By Matthew Arnold