George Arnold And George Herbert's Dover Beach And Easter Wings

In the second stanza, Arnold’s poem makes a radical shift through time and begins to give us an idea of why the waves bring sadness. Suddenly we are in ancient Greece with “Sophocles long ago…” who listened to the waves and they brought “Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery”

He uses his surrounding landscape, a lot in his poems and it paints a very real picture. This one speaks of the sea and sand. The meeting between two worlds, which also serves the theme of the poem. Thomas suggests that the reality that any one of us find ourselves in, actually becomes our truth. But there is also always a choice, good and bad in everything.

Swinton begins Raging with Compassion with the story of a child’s sudden death. His neighbor calls, frantic, to say that his 11-year-old dropped dead while walking home. Swinton identifies this as the moment he realized “something was fundamentally wrong with the way I had been conceptualizing and dealing with the problem of evil and the reality of suffering” (10). I, also, had a similar moment of realization, also because of a child’s death. In October 2016, my sister Cate was 3 weeks away from delivering her first child when they discovered that the baby’s heart had stopped beating—Hannah had died. All the clichés and platitudes about how “God needed her home” and “everything happens for a reason” were worthless at best and fundamentally wrong at worst. There were no words for the pain our family felt, and I was grateful that for the most part people did not try to give us words. However, there still was the temptation by some to explain away the tragedy, or defend God in the midst of it.

In our daily life, we can see, heard, or even experience the situation of human suffering. This is a deep, serious experience which on one hand, requires a depression, loss of personal identity, and/or sense of meaningless, but in the other hand, can bring us to an awareness of our finitude and our sense of dependence. John Paul II in Salvifici Doloris mentions it as a mystery which invites us to deepen so that we can live in hope.

The words hope and suffering could not be more opposite. Naturally, hope is a positive word and suffering is a negative one. However, if we pay attention we can see that although these words have entirely different meanings, they interact with each other. We may not know why suffering occurs, but what we do know is there is hope. Throughout this paper, I will be discussing the meaning of hope, how we are to receive it and the church’s response to it. Then, I will contrast with meaning of suffering, why it is present in the world and the church’s response to it. With all this said, I will finally discuss my beliefs on both subjects.

Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach uses great examples of symbolism and allegory to change the importance of his descriptions. “The Sea of Faith. Begin, and cease, and then again begin. With tremulous cadence slow and bring the eternal note of sadness in.”. The “Sea of Faith” is a more obvious symbol that Arnold uses to express his sense of faith and defenselessness towards the unexplainable inner workings of life. However

Since Adam and Eve’s sin, suffering has become an inevitable aspect of life. It became an inescapable part of living in this world. God does not even spare his faithful servants from it. If we view suffering as only pain and hardship and forget to view the positive side of suffering with Christ, we become consumed by the suffering and would not learn anything from it. However, viewing suffering positively only is in the sense deceiving ourselves. There should be a balance between the two; suffering is educational, but if we don’t view suffering as it is, we will not learn anything from suffering. How does one learn without recognizing one’s mistake? Similarly, we will not learn from our suffering if we do not recognize it as suffering.

To be able to contrast the world’s attitude toward suffering and the Christian’s, one must first ask, “What is the world’s attitude?” Secondly one must ask, “What is the Christian’s attitude?” The world’s attitude can be divided into three views: fatalistic, deterministic, and humanistic. Fatalist believe in a very impersonal god and that fate controls the events in life, suffering is then necessary and unavoidable. Determinists believe the meaning of life or suffering in interpreted according to the practice in which they are involved, and depends on the force or being they acknowledge as supreme in power. Humanist believe that man can solve all his problems and that there is no God. Since does not play a part in the humanistic attitude, suffering

The poet, Matthew Arnold, uses descriptive language, language techniques and symbolism to dramatically enhance the poem, titled ‘Dover Beach’. He uses adjectives and punctuation such as Caesura for maximum effect. In the poem the “calm” and “full” sea represents science, trying to overthrow the flickering lights on top of the vast and mighty “English cliff” and the

Matthew Arnold is one of the many famous and prolific writers from the nineteenth century. Two of his best known works are entitled Dover Beach and The Buried Life. Although the exact date of composition is unknown, clearly they were both written in the early 1850s. The two poems have in common various characteristics, such as the theme and style. The feelings of the speakers of the poem also resemble each other significantly. The poems are concerned with the thoughts and feelings of humans living in an uncertain world. Even though Arnold wrote Dover Beach and The Buried Life around the same time, the

Firstly, the sea is always presented in the poem almost like a character, something with a personality. It is described as ‘’sluttish’’ (14) and ‘’dog-faced’’ (44). Framing the sea as having a difficult personality like this corroborates the difficulty of living in this place that the rest of the poem is trying to show us. Nonetheless, it is not an entirely negative life. Despite all the disadvantages of living there, the narrator’s grandmother stayed for years (21) and according to her granddaughter, ‘’she died blessed’’ (41). It is not exactly stated by whom she was blessed and one can argue it could be the sea itself but we can still conclude that it means she was somehow happy living in this place despite the difficulties it implied. She probably had a very personal relationship to this place and the narrator too, as we can see how the granddaughter paid attention thanks to a lot of little details spread throughout the poem. We learn for example how she let her pies cool on the window (33), and about the environment itself (6-7). Secondly, all these elements are grounded in a real setting even more thanks to names of several real places like Water-Tower Hill (1). We can therefore even imagine how it feels and look like for the narrator. This was not the case in Dover Beach. The beginning of Arnold’s poem might trick

Most of our grief and pain does not come as a clear punishment for sins. 1. Most of it comes out of nowhere and baffles our sense of justice.

Suffering is a staple to the human condition. It can light the fire beneath and push progress, or it can lead to wallowing and a sense of helplessness. Often, helplessness leads to despair, which leads to more suffering, beginning an endless cycle of distress and anguish. Once stuck in this cycle, personal suffering begins to affect all aspects of one’s life, especially the environment around them. This feeling moves across genres and literary eras, giving a sense of human connection across generations. In Robert Browning’s Caliban Upon Setebos, Caliban is stuck in the world of an uncaring god. With an inability to please him, Caliban is helpless in his plight. Similarly, Hamm, from Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, is stuck in a cycle of

Stanza 3 of Dover Beach shows the ushering in of new thoughts and ideas, and the removal of the hold that religion has on society in the Victorian Era. “The Sea of Faith/ Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore” and “But now I only hear/ Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar/ Retreating, to the breath/ Of the night-wind, down the vast edges of drear (Arnold)” reflects this introduction of new thought into society. In Parking Lot, lines 9-12 shows how the narrator