Literature Review on "Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold"

Literature Review 4 pages (1393 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold, "We Are Many" by Pablo Neruda, and "Do Not Go Gentle" by Dylan Thomas each explore different understandings of time and aging. Each poem includes a set of observations, of the natural world, of the self, and of various ideas of dying men, respectively, and carefully weaves these observations into an attempt at understanding life and aging. Arnold attempts to understand a generalized notion of life and how to move through it as one gets old, Neruda attempts to understand his own life, and Thomas attempts to understand the life of his father.

Matthew Arnold's free verse poem, "Dover Beach," is often understood as an elegy for the slow wane of unshakable Christian belief in the 19th century. The narrator looks out across the straight of Dover, acutely aware of the interrelated natural rhythms that surround him, including night (as opposed to day), the full tide (as opposed to low tide), the moon, and ocean waves. Though each of these measures of time, that of a wave, that of the tide, that of the night, that of a month, has its own unique periodicity, the narrator understands that they all share a paradoxically quivering slowness.

These natural rhythms are made most present for the reader through the (similarly paradoxical) sonic image of the beach pebbles roaring back to the sea and Arnold's anaphoral repetition of text ideas used to illustrate this sound. The presence of myriad natural rhythms leads the narrator to reflect on the ebb and flow of human misery, as it did also for Sophocles. In this regard, he places himself within an historical rhythm, the longest cycle of time in the poem. Sophocles, at the beginning of this time cycle, noticed the rhythm of the pebbles in the waves, as does the narrator now, at the end of this time cycle. It is perhaps a point of poetic conceit that nobody else was lead to reflect on the ebb and flow of human misery in the interim. Between Sophocles and the narrator was the slow rise and slow decline of Christian faith, which presumably offered a reprieve from the contemplation of misery. Although this is longest time cycle in the poem, Arnold emphasizes its shortness in the face of eternity by describing it as "retreating to the breath of the wind," the shortest time cycle in the poem.

In the final stanza, the narrator proposes to his love that the way to live in the world and to endure the various cycles of their lives is by eschewing the world, including that which seems beautiful and new, and being only true to each other. Only then can they perhaps avoid falling into the armies of humanity, fighting blindly about that which they have no true understanding.

Neruda's "We are many" is written by a man attempting to pin down and understand the nature of himself. He sees as many incarnations of himself as there are situations in which he has found himself. "We" is a quirky kind of synecdoche. Usually the whole self is understood as the singular "I," but because Neruda is describing his singular self in terms of many incarnations, he describes the unified "I" as a plural "we." The multiplicitous "we" then substitutes for "I," which, for Nerdua, is merely a part of the whole. Curiously, Neruda maintains the narrative integrity of his "I" while describing the multitude of the "we." Somehow, the voice of the narrator is discrete from the collective, and yet the reader understands that all of the various identities, the speaker as well as those spoken of, are actually one person. Through this narrative device, Neruda manages to perplex the reader in the same way that he is perplexed by the various versions of himself.

While Neruda never states it overtly, this is clearly a poem of an older man. Neruda demonstrates a calm self-reflection that is born of experience. While he claims not to know himself, he in fact knows himself incredibly well. He has had many experiences with himself, and is able to contemplate these experiences with distance and humility. The narrator has amassed an enormous collection… READ MORE

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