The event described in the poem is therefore probably Arnold’s honeymoon – which was indeed taken at Dover in Kent.
He reflects that underneath this veneer of calm, there is something more volatile and unsettling: ‘the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, / At their return, up the high strand’.
This sounds like a simple description of the waves tossing the pebbles about the place on the shingly beach, but behind it there lurks the Victorians’ geological fascination with pebbles, shells, and other remnants of the Earth’s distant past.
The poem considers how all this may have appeared to Arnold’s companion.
Click here for more information about Matthew Arnold’s life.
Arnold knew very well where his poems had a place and how the recognition would follow.
He is sometimes also called as the third great Victorian poet.
But the fact remains that ‘Dover Beach’ is a great Victorian poem, one of Arnold’s finest, and an important one to grapple with, read, discuss, analyse, and consider when dealing with Victorian responses to faith and doubt.
You can read Anthony Hecht’s ‘response’ to Arnold’s poem, ‘The Dover Bitch’, here.
Why should we despair, if the retreating Sea of Faith will, like the tides, come back again in time?
Perhaps this is to over-analyse the poem; perhaps it is to mistake Matthew Arnold himself for his speaker, standing at the window, gazing out at Dover beach.
Comments Essays On Dover Beach By Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold Dover Beach Essays AntiEssays
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Analysis of dover beach by matthew arnold - WriteWork
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Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold Free Essay Example, 1250 words
Discards all this and isolates a single sensory experience, te “grating roar/ Of pebbles which the waves draw back, ad fling/ At their return, u the high strand”Arnold 86.…
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Dr Oliver Tearle's commentary on 'Dover Beach' by Matthew Arnold 'Dover Beach' is one of the best-known and best-loved of Victorian poems, and the most widely anthologised poem by a Victorian figure whose poetic output was considerably slimmer than that of many of his contemporaries, such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson or Robert Browning.…
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Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold Essays Over 180,000 Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold Essays, Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold Term Papers, Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold Research Paper, Book Reports. 184 990 ESSAYS, term and research papers available for UNLIMITED access…
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Dover Beach By Matthew Arnold Essay. While the free essays can give you inspiration for writing, they cannot be used 'as is' because they will not meet your assignment's requirements. If you are in a time crunch, then you need a custom written term paper on your subject dover beach by matthew arnold…
Dover Beach, Sample of Essays -
Before we can discuss Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” a brief biography of the poet will help us understand the poem and the mood he is in while writing it. The reader should know that Matthew Arnold married Fanny Lucy Wightman at Dover, despite her father’s disapproval.…