Dover Beach Explication
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 "gl
Throughout history, in fiction and reality, human suffering is present. "This, together with the flawless language and varying verse rythm, expresses and vindicates the speaker's determination to recognize the terror of truth and at the same time to assert the power of human love to transcend blind fate" ( Madden ). ------------------------------------------------------------------------**Bibliography**Buckler, William E. "Arnold takes a simple image as a beach and the waves, and casts it into a new light of one recognizing that this world in which he lived was an illusion of "various, beautiful dreams,"" (Buckler).
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Acceptance Essays
