Essay on the Victorian View of Dover Beach -- Arnold Dover Beach Essay

The puritanical View of capital of Delaware Beach As the teller of Matthew Arnolds capital of Delaware Beach looks out his windowpane, he sees a beautiful valet of nature the sea and the cliffs under the glow of the moon. Describing this scene to his lover, he invites her to come to the window so that she might see it too (6). However, it is not just a beautiful beach that the utterer wishes his lover to see. Rather, he wants her to see Dover Beach as an ironic image that is a representation of his exclusively human. Likewise Matthew Arnold wants his reader to recognize the speaker system and scene as a portrait of Arnolds own world and feelings. What Arnold is writing about is not a poetic fiction it is a reflection of the changes he sees in his world due to industrialism, science, and a rationalism that opposes traditional religious belief. While Arnold uses Dover Beach to represent this modern world of change, he creates a speaker to represent the tension that the poet a nd his fellow Victorians feel while living in a modern world, they long for the great ages of the past. Like Arnold, the speaker feels isolated from the world around him he looks out the window and sighs for lost palaces below the sea (Dahl 36). Initially, the beach that Arnolds speaker describes seems serene, calm, and peaceful. This is the Romantic world that the speaker (and Arnold) wants to have intercourse in. However, for Arnold the modern world can be peaceful only if lifelike order and the authority of social institutions can be maintained. Arnolds recognition of the purposeless illusion of such stability soon overcomes the sense of tranquility with which the verse opens. As the speaker begins to contemplate the scene and listens to the pebbles grating with the waves, an ... ...s the apparent joyousness offered by Dover Beach in the beginning. However, both the calmness and the vehemence of the beach, both the pleasure and the despair of the speaker, are true to t he Victorian consciousness. Arnold and his speaker want the world to be one of peace and tranquility, but they cannot avail but see its reality. This duality dramatizes the conflicted temperament of the Victorians. What Dover Beach as a place symbolizes to the narrator of the poem, Dover Beach as a poem expresses for Arnold and his Victorian audience. Works Cited Arnold, Matthew. Dover Beach. 1867. A Pocketful of Poems. Ed. David Madden. Fort Worth, TX Harcourt Brace, 1996. x. Dahl, Curtis. The Victorian Wasteland. College English 16 (1955) 341-47. Rpt. in Victorian Literature Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. Austin Wright. New York Oxford UP, 1961. 32-40.