Arnold's
"Dover Beach"
H. Wayne
Schow
Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" concludes with a pessimistic lamentation relative to the possibility of human happiness in a time bereft of faith:
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
(emphasis added).
Arnold may have lost his faith, but he seems
not to have forgotten the cadences of the King James Bible. In Romans 8.38-39
Paul writes:
For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor
life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things
to come, [n]or height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to
separate us from the love of God. . . (emphasis
added).
These italicized lists-brief but
sweeping-provoke comparison, especially in the strikingly similar phraseology
derived from their negative correlative conjunctions. But their sense is
pointedly opposed. In the verses from Romans, Paul is affirming faith in the
sure and unceasing love of God, whereas Arnold itemizes the emptinesses that
imply the Divine absence and the impossibility of
faith.
Indeed, it is likely that Arnold, who knew
the Bible well, deliberately constructed the grammar of his lines to echo Romans
and, through the contrast of the evoked contexts, attempted to intensify the
pathos of the modern condition. Certainly, the allusion, whether conscious or
not, adds richness to one of the great poems in the English
canon.
WORK
CITED
Arnold, Matthew. "Dover Beach." The Portable
Matthew Arnold. Ed. Lionel Trilling, New York: Viking Press,
1949.
