Matthew Arnold's Biography and Analysis of his Dover Beach

1. (1822-1888)
Nikki Akraminejad

2. 
 Matthew Arnold , poet and critic, was born at
Laleham on the Thames, the eldest son of Thomas
Arnold, historian and great headmaster of Rugby,
and of Mary (Penrose) Arnold.
 Although remembered now for his elegantly argued
critical essays, Matthew Arnold began his career as a
poet, winning early recognition as a student at the
Rugby School.
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

3. 
 In 1844, after completing his undergraduate degree
at Oxford, he returned to Rugby as a teacher of
classics.
 In 1847 he became private secretary to Lord
Lansdowne, who in 1851 secured him an
inspectorship of schools, which almost to the end of
his life was to absorb the greater part of his time and
energies, and may have been partly responsible for
the smallness of his poetical output. But it shortly
enabled him to marry.
Life

4.  In 1850 Matthew Arnold met and fell in love with Frances
Lucy Wightman, the daughter of Sir William Wightman,
Judge of the Court of Queen's Bench.
 He wished to marry her, but her father objected to this
because Arnold did not seem to have the financial means to
support a wife and future children.
 In August 1850, the Judge took his family on a trip to
Flanders (via Calais) and Germany. Arnold, himself on a trip
to the Italian lakes, stayed in Calais for a few days, just
hoping to catch a glimpse of Frances Lucy. "Calais Sands"
must have been written at that time, for the poem clearly
shows what his emotions were at that time.
Love Life

5.  In the spring of the following
year, Matthew Arnold was
appointed an Inspector of
Schools, a job which would
earn him £ 700 a year —
enough to support a family.
The couple announced their
engagement in early April ,
married on the 10 June 1851,
and spent their one-week
honeymoon at Alverston in
Hampshire. On the 1
September, they took a ferry
from Dover to Calais and then
travelled on to Paris.
 Parts of "Dover Beach" seem
to be quite compatible with
the honeymoon scenery. The
general melancholy of the
poem greatly contrasts the
happy situation in which
Matthew Arnold found
himself.
Marriage

6. 
 Matthew Arnold, a familiar figure at the Club, a
frequent diner-out and guest at great country houses,
fond of fishing and shooting, a lively conversationalist,
he read constantly, widely, and deeply, and in the
intervals of supporting himself and his family by the
quiet drudgery of school inspecting, filled notebook
after notebook with meditations of an almost monastic
tone.
Arnold's character

7. 
 Meditative and rhetorical, Arnold's poetry often
wrestles with problems of psychological isolation. In
"To Marguerite—Continued," for example, Arnold
revises Donne's assertion that "No man is an island,"
suggesting that we "mortals" are indeed "in the sea of
life enisled." Other well-known poems, such as
"Dover Beach," link the problem of isolation with
what Arnold saw as the dwindling faith of his time.
Despite his own religious doubts, a source of great
anxiety for him, in several essays Arnold sought to
establish the essential truth of Christianity.
Arnold's character

8. 
Poetry
Some consider Arnold to be the bridge between Romanticism and
Modernism. His use of symbolic landscapes was typical of the
Romantic era, while his skeptical and pessimistic perspective was
typical of the Modern era.

9. Poetry
 The mood of Arnold’s poetry tends to be of plaintive
reflection, and he is restrained in expressing emotion. He
felt that poetry should be the 'criticism of life' and express
a philosophy.
 Arnold's philosophy is that true happiness comes from
within, and that people should seek within themselves for
good, while being resigned in acceptance of outward
things and avoiding the pointless turmoil of the world.
 However, he argues that we should not live in the belief
that we shall one day inherit eternal bliss. If we are not
happy on earth, we should moderate our desires rather
than live in dreams of something that may never be
attained. This philosophy is clearly expressed in such
poems as "Dover Beach“.

10.  Arnold's work as a critic begins with the Preface to the
Poems which he issued in 1853 under his own name,
including extracts from the earlier volumes along with
"Sohrab and Rustum" and "The Scholar-Gipsy“.
 In its emphasis on the importance of subject in poetry, on
"clearness of arrangement, rigor of development,
simplicity of style" learned from the Greeks, and in the
strong imprint of Goethe and Wordsworth, may be
observed nearly all the essential elements in his critical
theory.
Literary Criticism

11. 
 His religious views were unusual for his time.
Scholars of Arnold's works disagree on the nature of
Arnold's personal religious beliefs. Under the
influence of Baruch Spinoza and his father, Dr.
Thomas Arnold, he rejected the supernatural
elements in religion, even while retaining a
fascination for church rituals. Arnold seems to
belong to a pragmatic middle ground that is more
concerned with the poetry of religion and its virtues
and values for society than with the existence of
God.
Religious criticism

12.  He wrote in the preface of God and the Bible in 1875
“The personages of the Christian heaven and their
conversations are no more matter of fact than the
personages of the Greek Olympus and their
conversations.”
 He also wrote in Literature and Dogma: "The word
'God' is used in most cases as by no means a term of
science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and
eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, as a not
fully grasped object of the speaker's consciousness —
a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different
things by it as their consciousness differs.“
Religious criticism

13. 
 He defined religion as "morality touched with
emotion".
 However, he also wrote in the same book, "to pass
from a Christianity relying on its miracles to a
Christianity relying on its natural truth is a great
change. It can only be brought about by those whose
attachment to Christianity is such, that they cannot
part with it, and yet cannot but deal with it
sincerely."
Religious criticism

14. His 1867 poem "Dover Beach" depicted a nightmarish
world from which the old religious verities have
receded. It is sometimes held up as an early, if not the
first, example of the modern sensibility.

15. 
 In Stefan Collini's opinion, "Dover Beach" is a difficult poem to
analyze, and some of its passages and metaphors have become
so well known that they are hard to see with "fresh eyes".
Arnold begins with a naturalistic and detailed nightscape of the
beach at Dover in which auditory imagery plays a significant
role ("Listen! you hear the grating roar"). The beach, however, is
bare, with only a hint of humanity in a light that "gleams and is
gone". Reflecting the traditional notion that the poem was
written during Arnold's honeymoon, one critic notes that "the
speaker might be talking to his bride".
Analysis of Dover Beach

16. The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; —on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, 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.

17. Arnold looks at two aspects of this scene, its soundscape (in the first and
second stanzas) and the retreating action of the tide (in the third stanza).
He hears the sound of the sea as "the eternal note of sadness". Sophocles,
a 5th century BC Greek playwright who wrote tragedies on fate and the
will of the gods, also heard this sound as he stood upon the shore of the
Aegean Sea. Critics differ widely on how to interpret this image of the
Greek classical age. One sees a difference between Sophocles interpreting
the "note of sadness" humanistically, while Arnold in the industrial
nineteenth century hears in this sound the retreat of religion and faith. A
more recent critic connects the two as artists, Sophocles the tragedian,
Arnold the lyric poet, each attempting to transform this note of sadness
into "a higher order of experience".
Analysis of Dover Beach
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

18. Having examined the soundscape, Arnold turns to the action of the tide itself
and sees in its retreat a metaphor for the loss of faith in the modern age, once
again expressed in an auditory image ("But now I only hear / Its melancholy,
long, withdrawing roar"). This third stanza begins with an image not of
sadness, but of "joyous fulness" similar in beauty to the image with which the
poem opens
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.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges
drear And naked shingles of the world.

19. The final stanza begins with an appeal to love, then moves on to the famous
ending metaphor. Critics have varied in their interpretation of the first two
lines; one calls them a "perfunctory gesture ... swallowed up by the poem's
powerfully dark picture", while another sees in them "a stand against a world
of broken faith". Midway between these is one of Arnold's biographers, who
describes being "true / To one another" as "a precarious notion" in a world that
has become "a maze of confusion".
The metaphor with which the poem ends is most likely an allusion to a passage
in Thucydides's account of the Peloponnesian War. He describes an ancient
battle that occurred on a similar beach during the Athenian invasion of Sicily.
The battle took place at night; the attacking army became disoriented while
fighting in the darkness and many of their soldiers inadvertently killed each
other. This final image has also been variously interpreted by the critics. Culler
calls the "darkling plain" Arnold's "central statement" of the human condition.
Pratt sees the final line as "only metaphor" and thus susceptible to the
"uncertainty" of poetic language.

20. 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 poem's discourse", Honan tells us, "shifts literally and symbolically
from the present, to Sophocles on the Aegean, from Medieval Europe
back to the present—and the auditory and visual images are dramatic
and mimetic and didactic. Exploring the dark terror that lies beneath his
happiness in love, the speaker resolves to love—and exigencies of history
and the nexus between lovers are the poem's real issues. That lovers may
be 'true / To one another' is a precarious notion: love in the modern city
momentarily gives peace, but nothing else in a post-medieval society
reflects or confirms the faithfulness of lovers. Devoid of love and light
the world is a maze of confusion left by 'retreating' faith."

21. Critics have questioned the unity of the poem, noting that the sea of the
opening stanza does not appear in the final stanza, while the "darkling plain"
of the final line is not apparent in the opening. Various solutions to this
problem have been proffered. One critic saw the "darkling plain" with which
the poem ends as comparable to the "naked shingles of the world". "Shingles"
here means flat beach cobbles, characteristic of some wave-swept coasts.
Another found the poem "emotionally convincing" even if its logic may be
questionable. The same critic notes that "the poem upends our expectations of
metaphor" and sees in this the central power of the poem. The poem's
historicism creates another complicating dynamic. Beginning in the present it
shifts to the classical age of Greece, then (with its concerns for the sea of faith)
it turns to Medieval Europe, before finally returning to the present. The form
of the poem itself has drawn considerable comment. Critics have noted the
careful diction in the opening description, the overall, spell-binding rhythm
and cadence of the poem and its dramatic character. One commentator sees
the strophe-antistrophe of the ode at work in the poem, with an ending that
contains something of the "cata-strophe" of tragedy. Finally, one critic sees the
complexity of the poem's structure resulting in "the first major 'free-verse'
poem in the language".

22. Presented by Nikki Akraminejad

23. 
 http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/bio.
html
 http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/tou
che2.html
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Arnold
 http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/matthew-
arnold
 http://www.gradesaver.com/matthew-arnold-
poems/study-guide/about/
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Beach
Online Resources