Dover Beach
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| Dover Beach |
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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.
Sophocles
long ago
Heard it on the
Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbidebb 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 girdlefurl'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.
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.
(1867)
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