Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold, 도버 해변, 매튜 아놀드

 

Dover Beach

Matthew Arnold

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.




"Dover Beach" is the most celebrated poem by Matthew Arnold, a writer and educator of the Victorian era. The poem expresses a crisis of faith, with the speaker acknowledging the diminished standing of Christianity, which the speaker sees as being unable to withstand the rising tide of scientific discovery. New research and intellectual inquiry cast doubt on humankind's central and special role in the universe. The speaker in the poem senses this change almost subconsciously, seeing and hearing it in the sea that the speaker is looking out upon. In its expression of alienation, doubt, and melancholy, the poem is often interpreted as a remarkably forward-thinking precursor to 20th century crises of faith—like Existentialism and Absurdism. In essence, the poem is an inquiry into what it means to be alive. 




Summary
The speaker looks out upon a calm sea, and observes the fullness of the tide and the moon reflecting on the water. Looking across the English channel, the speaker sees the lights of the French coast fade away, while the cliffs of the English coast stand tall and bright, and the bay seems calm. Suddenly, the speaker addresses someone else, and implores this person to come and look at what the speaker is looking at, and to enjoy the night's pleasant air. The speaker senses something is not quite right, and describes the spray where the water meets the moonlit land. The speaker instructs the other person to listen to the sound of the pebbles as the waves shift them back and forth, up the beach and down again. The speaker notes this slow repeating action, and identifies it with eternal sadness. 

All of a sudden, the speaker thinks about the ancient Greek playwright, Sophocles, and imagines Sophocles hearing the same sadness in the Aegean Sea as the speaker hears now on the English coast. Sophocles, in the mind of the speaker, likens the sad sound of the waves to the general sorrow of humanity, which moves like the waves. The speaker then notices another thought that comes with the sound of the sea. 

Explaining this next thought, the speaker describes religious faith as a sea that was once full like the tide. At that time, it reached around the earth like a girdle. Now, though, the speaker just hears that sea's sad retreat. As the Sea of Faith becomes smaller, says the speaker, it disappears into the atmosphere and leaves the edges of the world naked. 

The speaker suddenly addresses the companion as "love," and states desperately that the two of them need to treat each other with honesty and authenticity. This is because the world, though it has a dream-like quality of variety, beauty and newness, doesn't actually offer joy, love or clarity. Neither, claims the speaker, can it provide certainty, peace, or relief from pain. The speaker then compares their collective situation to standing on a flat and dark piece of land, which is caught up in the chaos of fighting. Here, battles between unknowing groups continue under the cover of darkness. 

 

Themes

Loss of Faith and Certainty
Written during the Victorian era, Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” admits to and laments the loss of religious faith that came with advances in various fields at the time: evolutionary biology, geology, archeology, and textual analysis of the Bible, to name a few. The poem senses the turn of a historical epoch and finds this change echoed in the transitional figure of the beach—the blurry border between land and sea. The poem thus asks the reader to consider what is lost in humankind’s movement away from the (debatable) certainties of the Christian faith. 

For the speaker, loss of faith equates to loss of certainty. The Dover beach itself seems to embody this loss, both in its sights and its sounds. At first, the poem offers no clues that its main subject is the loss of faith. Instead, it begins by describing the atmosphere in which the speaker stands. The descriptions of the sea and the sound of the pebbles on the beach are lyrically beautiful at first, but they mask “the eternal note of sadness” that is revealed at the end of stanza 1. This sudden intrusion of sadness hints at the speaker’s sense of loss, which finds fuller expression later in the poem. Through the symbol of the sea, the poem suggests two key ideas: firstly, that major shifts in the fabric of society occur subtly—the beach’s slow, repetitive movements symbolize the gradual but inevitable loss of faith that the speaker senses in this historical moment. 

Secondly, mapping the loss of religious faith onto the movement of the waves implies that these kinds of historical changes come in cycles—waves, in other words. Indeed, the speaker imagines the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles hearing the same sadness in the sea that the speaker hears now. That is, the speaker sees an analogy between the irrelevance of the classical Greek Gods in the speaker’s time with the coming irrelevance of the Christian God in the near future. That doesn’t mean that religious faith will return, but more that something will come along to take its place (in this case, the dominance of science). 

The speaker's position on this loss of religious faith becomes clear in the third stanza. Faith once made the world “full” and “bright”—that is, it offered comfort and joy in its certainty. Its loss, then, represents “melancholy.” What’s more, the “Sea of Faith” once touched the shores of the entire world, but is now “withdrawing.” The poem is essentially saying that this loss of faith is global, in turn suggesting the vast reach of scientific advancements at the time. The speaker doubles down on the idea that scientific advancement represents a loss rather than a gain in the poem’s final couplet, saying that the new era will herald “confused alarms of struggle and flight,” and “ignorant armies clash[ing] by night.” In other words, the speaker believes that scientific advancement will bring only scientific—not spiritual—certainty and will lead to more doubt and questioning (which is, in fact, an important part of the scientific method of inquiry). Overall, then, the poem expresses a kind of resignation. The speaker fully admits the change that is in process—it is as inevitable as the waves rising and falling—and challenges the reader to consider whether this loss of faith is progress or a wrong turn. “Dover Beach,” then, is a deeply pessimistic poem that questions the dominant values of its day and embodies the sense of grief that some felt at the prospect of the loss of religion. This questioning still stands up in the 21st century, calling on its readers to examine whether their own lives are spiritually fulfilled. 

Nature and Alienation
Linked to the idea of a loss of faith is a shift in the way people relate to the natural environment. Written shortly after the era of the Romantic poets, who praised nature as an antidote to overly rational thinking, “Dover Beach” questions humankind’s relationship with nature. Instead of finding happiness or the sublime in the natural environment, the speaker finds a deep sense of sorrow (even while admitting to the beach’s beauty). The cold indifference and vast power of the natural world make the speaker feel small and insignificant. The poem is therefore an attempt to capture the complexity of human experience as just one part of the natural world, rather than its center. 

Central to the poem is an implicit admission that mankind is merely one part of a larger system—the natural world. The natural scene prompts the speaker to think about timescales that make their own life seem less significant. The speaker looks out on a scene that is, on the one hand, beautiful, but on the other, a powerful reminder of nature’s indifference to humankind. The beach and the sea are by far the most prominent figures in the poem. As products of millions of years of erosion and water movement, they represent scales of time well beyond the expanse of human life, and perhaps beyond the mind’s capacity to comprehend them too. 

This sense of deep time alienates the speaker from the natural scene that the speaker is observing. The scene makes the speaker feel small and creates a feeling that nature is almost antagonistic towards the trials of humankind, as demonstrated by the harsh sound of the beach, which “roars” with the “eternal note of sadness” as the pebbles move with the waves. The mention of eternity here specifically links the idea of time to the speaker’s alienation—without God to provide the certainty of eternal afterlife, the timescales evoked by nature seem almost mocking of humankind’s limited place in the world. 

The speaker's thoughts about the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles further emphasizes the tragedy that the speaker believes is occurring. The speaker imagines Sophocles hearing the same loneliness and sorrow in the sea as the speaker does in the poem. For the speaker, human life is fundamentally sad—and Sophocles, as a writer of tragedies, must have heard that same sadness in the sea. On the one hand, then, the poem argues that nature has always had this alienating effect. But on the other hand, it also seems that the speaker is particularly mindful of the present moment, the moment when the poem was written—the use of present tense throughout demonstrates that the speaker feels that the current moment is an especially alienating time. 

The natural setting of the poem, then, makes the speaker question everything about human existence, a state that was once made certain by religious faith. There is a paradoxical nature about the beach—it is always shifting in shape, yet it can stay roughly as it is for millions of years, seemingly always in transition and always the same. This paradox embodies the way in which people try to make sense of their lives while the world itself offers no certainty. In this way, the poem is a precursor of 20th century Existentialism and is often considered ahead of its time. Ultimately, “Dover Beach” exposes the underlying melancholy of awe-inspiring natural sites. While the speaker does admit to the scene’s beauty, that beauty doesn’t compensate for the way in which the scene makes the speaker feel small and insignificant. 


Love
With the retreat of religion causing a crisis of spiritual faith, the speaker turns to love as an answer for the loss of God. Perhaps, the poem suggests, love between people can compensate for the loss of the connection between God and mankind. But the poem only argues that love has the possibility of creating the certainty that religion once did—it doesn’t make the case that this is inevitable. 

It is generally agreed that Arnold wrote “Dover Beach” while on his honeymoon. Whether or not this is definitely true, the speaker is certainly not alone in the poem. The speaker’s interactions with an off-stage (off-page) lover demonstrate the possible restoration of a different kind of faith—in love, rather than in God. The first five lines of the poem give nothing away in terms of whether the speaker has an addressee (beyond the reader). But lines 6 and 8 offer clear instructions to the speaker’s companion to come and share the experience of looking out at Dover beach. Given that the beach scene inspires such melancholy in the speaker, the speaker's attempt to share the experience is an argument for intimacy and honesty between people. Togetherness, the poem argues, can help in any situation. 

Stanzas 2 and 3, however, lack the direct address to the other person, and therefore seem to show the speaker retreating into their own psyche. The melancholy of the sea echoes the loss of religion, and almost swamps the speaker’s psyche entirely. But out of these depths comes the final stanza, which is spoken directly to the speaker’s lover. If the two lovers can be true to one another, suggests the speaker, then that will in part provide solace and certainty in a world that offers neither of these. The poem ends on a literal cliff-hanger, with the two lovers standing together—only the second time the poem uses “we”—awaiting what will come. Love, then, may be the only answer to the problems identified by the speaker: loneliness and loss of faith. 

But the poem does not end on an optimistic note, casting doubt on the idea that love will save the day. Instead, the speaker anticipates confusion, struggle, and violence. Though love might not be able to defeat these, the speaker presents it as the only potential solution. Love, then, is definitely valued in the poem, and the reader in turn is asked to share in that value. But love shows up in only a few brief moments, leaving its meaning far from certain. The poem can’t say for sure that love will be able to make life meaningful, and perhaps even suggests that it ultimately can't—but it is presented as the best option, and worth trying.  

 

도버 해변

오늘 밤에는 바다가 고요하다 
밀물은 차오르고 해수면 위에 뜬 달 
해협에서, 프랑스 해안의 빛 
빛나려다 말고 사라져 간다 
영국 해안 절벽이 우뚝 서 있고 
눈 부시게 광활한 고요한 만에서....... 

사랑이여, 우리 진실되게 살자 
서로에게, 우리 세상을 위해서라도 
꿈나라 같은 우리 땅에 누워서 
이렇게 다양한, 너무 아름다워서 새로운 

사실 기쁨도, 사랑도, 빛도 없고 
평화에 대한 확신도 없이 
그 어떤 고통도 도움이 되지 않는 곳이며 
그저 어둔 평원에 있는 것처럼 그러할 뿐 
비행기 폭격소리로 당황스러운 혼란 속에 
무장한 군대가 밤마다 충돌하는 곳



이 시는 매튜 아놀드가 1867년에 쓴 시로 다양한 해석의 대상이 되었다. 그것은 영국 해협을 건너 프랑스를 바라보고 있는 도버의 바다에 대한 서정적인 묘사로 시작된다. 그러나 바다에 대한 낭만적인 찬가가 아니라 인간 조건에 대한 은유로 가득 차 있으며 매튜 아놀드의 비관적인 시대관으로 끝나는데 해석하는 이들에 따라서 여러 해석을 하고 있는 시다.