Essay on the Victorian View of Dover Beach -- Arnold Dover Beach Essay

The Victorian View of Dover Beach As the narrator of Matthew Arnolds Dover Beach looks out his window, he sees a beautiful world of nature the sea and the cliffs under the glow of the moon. Describing this scene to his lover, he invites her to come to the window so that she might see it too (6). However, it is not just now a beautiful beach that the loudspeaker wishes his lover to see. Rather, he wants her to see Dover Beach as an ironic image that is a formation of his unhurt world. Likewise Matthew Arnold wants his reader to recognize the speaker and scene as a portrait of Arnolds own world and feelings. What Arnold is writing about is not a poetical fiction it is a reflection of the changes he sees in his world due to industrialism, science, and a rationalism that opposes traditional religious belief. While Arnold uses Dover Beach to represent this modern world of change, he creates a speaker to represent the tension that the poet and his fellow Victorians feel while livin g in a modern world, they ample for the great ages of the past. Like Arnold, the speaker feels isolated from the world around him he looks out the window and sighs for lost palaces beneath the sea (Dahl 36). Initially, the beach that Arnolds speaker describes seems serene, calm, and peaceful. This is the amorous world that the speaker (and Arnold) wants to live in. However, for Arnold the modern world can be peaceful only if natural order and the authority of social institutions can be maintained. Arnolds recognition of the futile illusion of such stability soon overcomes the sense of tranquility with which the poem opens. As the speaker begins to contemplate the scene and listens to the pebbles grating with the waves, an ... ...s the ostensible pleasure offered by Dover Beach in the beginning. However, both the calmness and the violence of the beach, both the pleasure and the despair of the speaker, are true to the Victorian consciousness. Arnold and his speaker want the worl d to be one of peace and tranquility, but they cannot help but see its reality. This duality dramatizes the conflicted temperament of the Victorians. What Dover Beach as a place symbolizes to the narrator of the poem, Dover Beach as a poem expresses for Arnold and his Victorian audience. Works Cited Arnold, Matthew. Dover Beach. 1867. A Pocketful of Poems. Ed. David Madden. Fort Worth, TX Harcourt Brace, 1996. x. Dahl, Curtis. The Victorian Wasteland. College English 16 (1955) 341-47. Rpt. in Victorian Literature Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. Austin Wright. New York Oxford UP, 1961. 32-40.