why “dover beach”?

Dover Beach – by Matthew Arnold

“The sea is calm to-night.
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 Agaean, 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.”

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Matthew Arnold once said that, “Two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.” Arnold was by no means an orthodox Christian. Most of his poetry shows little serious concern with the Christian revelation. Perhaps the nostalgic and thoughtfully sad undertones of Dover Beach are as close as he comes anywhere to an admission of, at least, the consolations offered by religion– religion that he witnesses retreating down the “naked shingles of the world.”

But with the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith sounding in his ears, he paints the picture of an increasingly secular world bereft of any spiritual motive, a world which offers: “Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.”  As a view into the seeming failure of religion as an informing principle in modern life, there is nothing to match the melancholy landscape of his poem “Dover Beach.”  His portrait of the world’s receding tide of faith is authentic and poignant:

“And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”