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Historical Pessimism And Imagery In Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach

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“Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold was written in 1851. Arnold wrote the lyric poem while he and his new bride visited Dover Beach (Rumens 1). Dover Beach is located off the south coast of England, 21 miles from the French port of Calais in Kent, France. Dover Beach is a calm and peaceful place where one can watch the ferries come and go from the port. It also provides beautiful white cliffs, the clearest waters, and a beautiful castle overlooking the beach (Lawmakers 1). According to Carol Rumens, Arnolds writing spurred from the ideals found in the “Classic World.” Rumens writes “In fact, those public values are privatized in the very word the poem conjures for us: honeymoon. Dover Beach fundamentally seems to be about a withdrawal into …show more content…

However, in contrast to the calm, peaceful feeling that Arnold gives in the first part of the poem, the auditory imagery changes the feel of the environment. Arnold writes - “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.” He emphasizes that he wants the readers to hear what he hears, by giving the reader the cue to switch from visual to auditory imagery with the exclamation of the word “Listen!” This is the point where the poem changes from a serene scene to a more frantic scene. Arnold uses auditory imagery descriptions such as “grating”, “tremulous cadence”, and “eternal note” to bring us to the new emotion he has arrived at – “Sadness”. The sounds from the pebbles and waves tie in to the next stanza, in which he references Sophocles, who heard the same sound “on the Aegean”. The Aegean Sea “is an arm of the Mediterranean Sea, located between the Greek peninsula on the west and Asia Minor on the east (Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica 1).” Sophocles’ works were usually sad or had a pessimistic overtone. Arnold insinuates that Sophocles must have looked out onto the waves and seen the same despair that he had, to write plays that were so depressing and bleak. Symbolism is when the writer uses variations of symbols to represent an idea. Arnold uses the sea and the land are two

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