10.5 The Receding Tide of faith
The positive aspect of Realism challenges what it sees as illusions cherished within a cultural orientation. As such, it is often steeped in melancholy. Let’s end this look at 19th Century Realism with a poem that captures the growing disillusionment of the age and has since spoken for many in dark times since.
As is our custom, we begin by reading the poem aloud. It can be tricky for those expecting a regular Meter. Do your best and listen to the audio file linked below.
Matthew Arnold. (1847). Dover Beach
The sea is calm tonight.
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,[1]
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles[2] long ago
Heard it on the Ægean,[3] 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.[4]
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle[5] 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[6] 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.
[1] Strand: i.e. the pebbled or sandy shore
[2] Sophocles: a Classical Greek dramatist who wrote tragedies such as Oedipus, which you remember from Module 3.
[3] Aegean: the section of the Mediterranean Sea which separates Greece from Turkey, traditionally the home waters for Classical Greek navies and traders.
[4] Distant Northern Sea: Dover Beach is situated on the narrowest part of the English Channel, separating England from France, and leading to what the English call the North Sea.
[5] Girdle: i.e. a belt
[6] Shingles: another term for a shoreline characterized by pebbles
Who is speaking to whom about what? That’s easy. A lover stands at the window of a room in Dover, England, looking out at the English Channel. The moon lights the beach and a “grating roar” signals the retreating tide, an “eternal note of sadness.”
As you process the poem’s Tropes, what Metaphor dominates? The ebbing tide, right? And what does that tide betoken? “The Sea of Faith,” once full but sliding away with a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” The poetic voice feels that certitudes and verities are fading away. So he (or she?) turns to the lover and pleads for a personal faithfulness: “Let us be true to one another” for the world offers neither assurance, …
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
References
Arnold, M. (1849). Dover Beach [Poem]. In New Poems. (1867). Poetry Foundation https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43588/dover-beach
an attitude of disillusioned skepticism which in art strives to represent reality as it is, questioning cultural myths and ideologies and including uncomfortable subjects that conventional art tends to overlook
a disciplined pattern of sound units throughout the lines of a poem. In English verse, meter is found in the number and a pattern of stressed and un-stressed syllables in a line
a figure of speech that plays on meaning so that the implied message differs from the ordinary sense of the expression. E.g. hyperbole, irony, metaphor, paradox, personification, simile.
a trope which denotes a “non-literal” thing, idea, or action to characterize a “real” term. E.g. “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players” (William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 1599).