Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), social and literary critic, educationalist, and poet, is linked to Kent by one poem, but, just as is the case with Ben Jonson and his `To Penshurst’ from over two hundred year previously, an extremely important one. `Dover Beach’ (1851) must be one of the most anthologised and cited poems written in English, and for that reason, along, of course, with the quality and meaning of the poem itself, means the link merits celebrating.
Arnold was a quintessential product of the 19th century establishment. His father, Thomas, is widely attributed with having saved, and then strengthened, the modern public school system in Britain. His formidable stewardship of Rugby as headmaster turned the fortunes of this particular place around, and contributed hugely to the national stereotype over the Victorian era of the `stiff upper lip’, devotion to duty, and the ethos of suppression of emotion that has ever since been attributed to the British. Ironically, after education at Winchester, Rugby and then Balliol College, Oxford, Arnold junior was to spend over three decades as the chief inspector for schools in the state sector.
His social commentary, from books like `Culture and Anarchy’ (1869) exercised immense influence at the time, and into the twentieth century, and showed that even if he occupied a place of privilege, he was acutely self-critical and aware. Part of this derived from the way that he wrestled with the novel issues of a society undergoing, unlike any over at the time, the impacts socially, culturally and politically of the industrial revolution. In one chapter of this work he outlines the standard divisions between upper, middle and working class, and reframes these simply as `barbarians, philistines, and populace.’ His championing of liberal, enlightened values was to be maintained in the following decades by figures ranging from T S Eliot to the more divisive F R Leavis.
As a poet, Arnold was prolific, and for a time was regarded as significant as contemporaries like Tennyson and Browning. But it is hard to see many of the hefty `Poetical Works’ collection put out by Macmillan in 1890 as being much read today – apart from one. `Dover Beach’ was written most probably on two visits to the town – one going on a honeymoon continental tour with his new wife, Frances Lucy, in 1851, around June, and the other on returning in October the same year.
Dover Beach as an actual place today is not perhaps one that readily lends itself to poetic musing. For a start, the beach is not easily accessible, at least from the town centre. But in addition to this, many many decades of industry and development have meant that much of it is given over to the extensive port. Famously, the Brexit debate over 2016 showed the amount of goods that come and go here from the continent, mostly by lorry. Before the construction of the Channel Tunnel too, in the late 1990s, this was the principle car and pedestrian access point. Few people over the age of 40 in 2020 therefore will not have at least come memory of visiting Dover, if only to transit it and get away on their holidays.
On another level, however, Dover as a place of importance symbolically, because of its role as the gateway to the British islands, something evidenced by the vast castle that has loomed over the town for over 800 years. This is another kind of place – something that figures in the works of Shakespeare, but also in Ian Fleming’s `Bond’ sagas. As a defensive frontier, as a place which has some kind of important meaning for what it means to be English, with the white cliffs in particular figuring in national sentiment, particularly for what was made of them in the Second World War, this town has a significance which is belied by what it is physically. `Dover Beach’ derives some of its power by wrestling with that. The poem operates on many levels – a lament for a world that was disappearing, for faith that was collapsing, and for changes that society was undergoing that were hard for people on an individual level to properly assimilate. Many of its terms, such as `sea of faith’ have become part of the store of expression for the English language. The most important aspect of the poem here however is the way in which it makes a specific and real place something other through the process of metaphor. The rising and falling tides for the beach in Arnold’s poem are not just movement of water, but indicative of something utterly different. At many places, the poem shifts from one frame to another, from the personal to the collective, and from one place to the wider world around it. On a personal level, too, it is intriguing to wonder why it was that on what must have been presumably a happy time in the poet’s life, he produced a piece with such a melancholy tone. Arnold himself was to die, 37 years later, after suffering a heart attack while running to catch a train in Liverpool to see his daughter who was arriving their by boat. A poignant end to the life of someone whose visit to Dover was evidently about much more than just transiting:
DOVER BEACH
The sea is calm to-night.
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 sand,
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.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, 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.
The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle 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 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.