In the Victorian age, Skepticism was wide-spread. Value systems turned topsy-turvy in the Victorian age. Religious conservatism was waging a desperate crusade against Darwinism and Utilitarianism. Arnold was emotionally attached to the old world, but intellectually inclined towards the new one. His poems reveal the picture of a sick patient in a sick society. “Dover Beach” is no exception in this regard.
At the outset of the poem, the poet brings together a number of images to suggest tranquility in contrast to the restlessness prevailing in the human world. The sea, the high tide, the moon-lit night, the vast cliffs of Dover give a picture of perfect serenity, poise and stability. J.D. Jump suggests that Arnold like Auden could best relate to his mental states through landscapes and thus exemplify the same.
Arnold says that sea was at high tide, the water was lit with the moonlight. The poet imagines that standing on the Dover, one could see the lights on the French coast. The lights were flickering and have now vanished. The vast cliff of the Dover appears even larger in the flickering light.
The speaker addresses someone who is most probably his beloved. He asks her to look out of the window. The silence of the night is broken by the breaking of the waves against the shore. When the lady-love looks out she can see the line of foam and froth left behind by the waves. It forms the dividing line between the shore and the sea. The speaker invites her attention to the only sound that is conspicuous now. It is the grating roar of the waves throwing the pebbles off to the shore. It is heard intermittently and rhythmically. The sound forms the sad, subdued, slow music of humanity which permeates the Victorian society. Like Sophocles, the people have found in this sound an expression of their melancholy and unrest.
Arnold hears the tide coming in with the pebbles. But soon the pebbles are thrown off. These waves reflect the ups and downs in human life. Just as the music of the waves will always be heard, sorrow and struggle are an inherent part of human life. Thus the poem reveals the poet’s heart with powerful symbolic significance. The sea is a metaphor used in many of Arnold’s other poems like “Despondency”, Human Life”,”Summer-Night”. etc.
Sophocles long ago must have heard the same sound of despair in the Aegean Sea just as Arnold does now. The Victorian people were in a similar mood situation now, and found themselves in a pensive mood questioning the world of Darwin and the19th century scientists. The condition of the Aegean and the Northern sea was the same, they were only distant in time and space. Sophocles, asserts Kreiger ,reminds us of the presentness of the past. Thus the universal significance.
Arnold feels that in such a crisis, love is the only panacea for all the ills of life. In a pregnant poetic utterance, he compares the present generation to “ignorant armies clashing at night.” n the primitivism of the statement humanity is seen as atelic. Murray Kreiger states in his essay :”Dover Beach and the Tragic sense of Eternal Recurrence” that human relationships are reversed here. As nature was humanized at the start , man is naturalized her. The non-purposive quality of science being read into him, his purposiveness has been deadened and in the words of Keats, ‘he has become a sod’.The image has so much influenced Arnold that we see the same picture in his Scholar-Gipsy”
Thus “Dover Beach” echoes the dispute, distractions and dilemma of the Victorian age. Hailed as the “first modern poem” by some critics it has shifted the point of view, for the first time, from the Christian tradition to the world of Darwin and the world of the 19th century scientists. The sea, the tide, the landscapes themselves have not changed, it is the despair and futility of mankind that comes forth from the poet’s mind and transmits nature. It illustrated for the first where man stood in relation with all the external objects of nature and for the first time where he stood in relationship to himself.
