The Victorian View of Dover Beach As the narrator of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" looks out the window, he sees a beautiful natural world: the sea and cliffs under the glow of the moon. Describing this scene to his lover, he invites her to "[come] to the window" so that she too can see it (6). However, it is not just a beautiful beach that the speaker wishes to see his lover. Rather, he wants her to see Dover Beach as an ironic image that is a representation of her entire world. Matthew Arnold similarly wants his reader to recognize the speaker and the scene as a portrait of Arnold's world and feelings. What Arnold is writing about is not 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. As Arnold uses Dover Beach to represent this changing modern world, he creates a speaker to represent the tension that the poet and his fellow Victorians feel: while living in a modern world, they long for the great eras of the past. Like Arnold, the speaker feels isolated from the world around him: he looks out the window and "sighs for the palaces lost beneath the sea" (Dahl 36). Initially, the beach described by the speaker Arnold seems serene, calm, and peaceful. This is the romantic world the speaker (and Arnold) want to live in. However, for Arnold the modern world can only be peaceful if the natural order and the authority of social institutions can be maintained. Arnold's recognition of the futile illusion of such stability soon overcomes the sense of tranquility with which the poem opens. As the speaker begins to contemplate the scene and listens to the pebbles squeaking with the waves, a "... middle of paper ...is the apparent pleasure offered by Dover Beach at first. However, both the calm and the violence of the beach, both the speaker's pleasure and desperation, are true to Arnold's Victorian consciousness and his The speakers want the world to be a world of peace and tranquility, but they cannot help but see its reality. This duality dramatizes the conflicted temperament of the Victorians What Dover Beach as a place symbolizes for the narrator of the poem, "Dover Beach." Victorian." College English 16 (1955): 341-47. Rpt. in Victorian Literature: Modern Critical Essays. Ed. Austin Wright. New York: Oxford SU, 1961. 32-40.
tags