‘Dover Beach’ by Matthew Arnold is a dramatic monologue, which indirectly rejects the very notion of a dramatic monologue itself. The listener in this dramatic monologue is absent and is being addressed by the poet as “love” and the speaker of this dramatic monologue is perhaps the narrator or the poet himself. Being written specifically in the pacific pessimistic note, the dramatic monologue tries to capture the tune of the Victorian times, especially, the falling of belief and people’s loss of faith through its landscape and sound escape.
The complete poem tries to utter the “eternal note of sadness” and express the inner fragmentation of the poet. The dramatic monologue is written into parts, in which the first section unfolds with more about the landscape; the imagery, which is rich in pictorial details; provokes, the melancholic aspect where the poet seems to be dejected and looking at how the waves of the sea are retreating. And they are creating a “tremendous cadence” and they are having a “grating roar” and expressing the pain that the sea might be feeling.
As the poem shifts into the second part, it obviously comes to the main theme as “the sea of faith that was once too full” but now it is shrinking and people who are left out on the shore are losing their faith and they are not what they were earlier. And here, the soundscape, the sounds, “grating roar”, and the waves that retreat, and the clash that armies are fighting, are creating a jarring and pessimistic note which is going to disturb the whole scene. The poet finds “neither certitude, nor joy, nor peace not love in pain.” He finds that there is utter chaos. People are in darkness and they don’t know what they are doing and whom they are killing. They seem to have lost their own solid grounding and they are ignorant.
The poem, nowhere comes to any compromise in showing the positive future. Rather it indicates the dying of the tradition and the loss of humanity. It depicts how Victorian society declines in morals and ethical sense of understanding. It also tries to depict the loss of religious traditions and the diversion of men from being believers to non-believers or to put it in plain words, scientific– the very word “scientific” is a really very debated term when it is applied with the people of the Victorian period. “Scientific” at that time meant something that was against religious beliefs, but at present its meaning is different. “Scientific” means straightforward.
Perhaps Matthew does not mean that people who are losing faith are becoming so straightforward. Rather they are becoming a lost generation or people who have lost their faith in God and so into their creator and they are out of the center. They are out of the sea of faith like “pebbles” and “naked shingles”, which are thrown and flung out from the sea.
© Dr. Sanjeev Vishwakarma
Literary Latitude 