The sea is calm tonight.

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-blanched 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.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, 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.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

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.

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.

About the Poem

Dover Beach is a lyric poem by the English poet Matthew Arnold. It was first published in 1867 in the collection New Poems; however, surviving notes indicate its composition may have begun as early as 1849. The most likely date is 1851.

The title, locale and subject of the poem’s descriptive opening lines is the shore of the English ferry port of Dover, in Kent, facing Calais, in France, at the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part (21 miles (34 km)) of the English Channel, where Arnold spent his honeymoon in 1851. Many of the beaches in this part of England are made up of small stones or pebbles rather than sand, and Arnold describes the sea ebbing over the stones as a “grating roar.”

Analysis of the Poem

Arnold wrote ‘Dover Beach’ around 1850, at a time when faith in God and religion seemed threatened by developments in scientific understanding and evolutionary theory. Although it is a poem about Arnold’s response to a spiritual crisis, it begins by capturing a moment in the physical world when Arnold is looking out towards France from Dover Beach.

How does he convey a sense of tranquillity and intense melancholy in those first fourteen lines? Can a poem be both sad and beautiful? Think about the ‘pathetic fallacy’, when a poet projects human feelings, such as sadness on onto inanimate objects, for example, the sea. (Incidentally, notice how the first twenty-eight lines are arranged loosely as two sonnets, and then the final stanza begins a little like a sonnet but, after the first eight lines, it finishes with a powerful, climactic ninth line.)

The poem may deal with ‘sadness’, ‘misery’, and ‘pain’, but there is also hope and consolation as Arnold turns to his companion at the start of the final stanza.