Dover Beach  

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"Dover Beach" is a lyric poem by the English poet Matthew Arnold. It was first published in 1867 in the collection New Poems, but 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 of the English Channel, where Arnold honeymooned in 1851.

Influence

William Butler Yeats responds directly to Arnold's pessimism in his four-line poem, "The Nineteenth Century and After" (1929):

Though the great song return no more
There's keen delight in what we have:
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave.

Anthony Hecht, US Poet Laureate, replied to "Dover Beach" in his poem "The Dover Bitch".

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of California crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, "Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc. etc."

The anonymous figure to whom Arnold addresses his poem becomes the subject of Hecht's poem. In Hecht's poem she "caught the bitter allusion to the sea", imagined "what his whiskers would feel like / On the back of her neck", and felt sad as she looked out across the channel. "And then she got really angry" at the thought that she had become "a sort of mournful cosmic last resort". After which she says "one or two unprintable things".

But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right.

Kenneth and Miriam Allott, referring to "Dover Bitch" as "an irreverent jeu d'esprit", nonetheless see, particularly in the line "a sort of mournful cosmic last resort", an extension of the original poem's main theme.

"Dover Beach" has been mentioned in a number of novels, plays, poems, and films:

  • In Dodie Smith's novel, I Capture the Castle (1940), the book's protagonist remarks that Debussy's Clair de Lune reminds her of "Dover Beach" (in the film adaptation of the novel, the character quotes (or, rather, misquotes) a line from the poem).
  • In Fahrenheit 451 (1951), author Ray Bradbury has his protagonist Guy Montag read part of "Dover Beach" to his wife Mildred and her friends after attempts at intellectual conversation fail and Montag discovers just how shallow and uncaring they are about their families and the world around them. One of Mildred's friends cries over the poem while the other chastises Montag for exposing them to something she deems obscene and the two break off their friendship with Mildred in disgust as they leave the house.
  • Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 (1961) alludes to the poem in the chapter "Havermyer": "the open-air movie theater in which—for the daily amusement of the dying—ignorant armies clashed by night on a collapsible screen."
  • In Charles M. Fair's "The Dying Self", he speaks of "the coming of this unhappy epoch, in which men are a danger to themselves roughly in proportion to their own triviality, announced in the Victorian Age" and exemplified by "the only first-rate poem Arnold ever wrote: 'Dover Beach'."
  • Ian McEwan quotes part of the poem in his novel Saturday (2005), where the effects of its beauty and language are so strong and impressive that it moves a brutal criminal to tears and remorse. He also seems to have borrowed the main setting of his novella On Chesil Beach (2005) from Dover Beach, additionally playing with the fact that Arnold's poem was composed on his honeymoon (see above).
  • Sam Wharton quotes the final stanza in his Jonathan Hare novel 'Ignorant Armies' set in 1954, and one of his characters uses it as a commentary on the failure of senior people to maintain appropriate standards of conduct.
  • In the musical Cabaret (1966), the American aspiring novelist Cliff Bradshaw recites parts of the poem to the singer Sally Bowles because being English she wants to hear proper English after having been in Berlin for some time.
  • In her novel Devices and Desires (1989) P.D. James's character Adam Dalgliesh, thinking about his response to a police officer after having discovered a murder on a beach on the north-east coast of Norfolk about "walking and thinking" on the beach notes that "I was thinking about the clash of ignorant armies by night, since no poet walks by the sea at moonlight without silently reciting Matthew Arnold's marvellous poem."

The poem is mentioned in:

The poem has also provided a ready source for titles:

  • On a Darkling Plain by Clifford Irving, A Darkling Plain by Philip Reeve, As on a Darkling Plain by Ben Bova (the title refers to the plain of a Saturnian moon covered with strange unexplained artefacts), A Tour of the Darkling Plain (the Finnegans Wake correspondence of Adaline Glasheen and Thornton Wilder), Clash by Night, a play by Clifford Odets (later made into a film noir by Fritz Lang), Clash by Night" a science fiction novel by Lewis Padgett [Henry Kuttner & CL Moore], Ignorant Armies" by Sam Wharton, and Norman Mailer's National Book Award winner The Armies of the Night about the 1967 March on the Pentagon.
  • The Sea of Faith movement is so called as the name is taken from this poem, as the poet expresses regret that belief in a supernatural world is slowly slipping away; the "sea of faith" is withdrawing like the ebbing tide.
  • Sea of Faith by John Brehm, a collection of poems [The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004] (and the title of the eponymous poem which begins Once when I was teaching "Dover Beach"

Even in the U. S. Supreme Court the poem has had its influence: Justice William Rehnquist, in his concurring opinion in Northern Pipeline Co. v. Marathon Pipe Line Co., 458 US 50 (1982), called judicial decisions regarding Congress's power to create legislative courts "landmarks on a judicial 'darkling plain' where ignorant armies have clashed by night."





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