The speaker in Dover Beach is talking to his lover. Arnold wrote this poem while he was on his honeymoon. Therefore this was obviously a very important and special place for him. Let's begin with the title. The Oxford English Dictionary defines dover as an unsettled sleep. But in the context of this poem, Dover refers not to an unsettled sleep, but to a setting. At the narrowest point on the English Channel, the light on the French coast is about twenty miles away. Since Dover Beach is on the coast of England, right near the English Channel, one would presume that when battles that took place in England, armies entered through the English Channel, quite possibly on that very beach. Dover Beach, being a place of battle, seems to be the perfect setting for a poem that relates to human misery and suffering.
             In the first line of the first stanza, the word "sea" is a parallel to human nature and human history. The sea rises and crashes, human misery rises and falls. Happiness in life in the world "gleams" and then is "gone". The "eternal note of sadness," is our own death. The death of a wave in the ocean, is like the death of a human life on land. It reminds us how human history itself is so sad.
             In lines 15-18, "Sophocles long ago heard it on the Aegean, and it brought into his mind the turbid ebb and flow of human misery," Arnold makes a reference to Antigone. In lines 637- 646, the chorus compares the fate of the house of Oedipus to the waves of the sea. Sophocles used waves to underscore the doom of Oedipus' family and home. The "ebbing" is the assertion by the affections of their mastery over the intellect in supplying a ground of confidence when it's assurance fails.
             Line 28, "and naked shingles of the world", according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "shingles" are beaches strewn with coarse gravel. This imagery parallels with the human necessity to suffer. Throughout history, in fiction and reality, hu...