Themes in Dover Beach and Selected Poems

The adjective “darkling” refers to that which is dark, in the dark, or in a state of darkening—all of which could apply to the “plain” in this line. The speaker envisions the night-cloaked seascape as a battleground. The sounds of the waves are once again personified, in his case as the “confused alarms” raised by “ignorant armies.” The clash can be interpreted in several ways. In one sense, it expresses the tone of unease and dread. On a somewhat more literal level, the clash might symbolize the struggles the speaker has referred to, namely those over faith. Taken in this context, the clashing armies represent the two sides of the debate over faith as it plays out, both in society and within the speaker himself. Crucially, both armies are “ignorant,” leaving readers with no sense of righteousness or resolution.

The final five lines of the poem restate the speaker’s sense of mounting darkness and foreboding. The world “really” is devoid of “joy,” “love,” and “light.” The use of “really” is key in that it clarifies the arc of disillusionment the speaker has undergone as the disturbing reality has revealed itself.

The final stanza reiterates the broader decline that takes place over the course of the poem. In this line, as in the opening lines of the poem, the world appears “like a land of dreams.” However, the word “dreams” signals the speaker’s grasp of the truth, for dreams are pleasant but ultimately fantastical. The reality that lies below is more troubling.

In the final stanza, Arnold’s speaker returns again to the beloved addressee. In a world marked by misery and devoid of faith, the speaker calls for him and his love to be “true/To one another” in the hope that marriage might serve as a source of meaning and a sanctuary from the world’s ills.

Arnold develops the metaphor of the “Sea of Faith,” describing how it “was once[…] at the full.” Arnold appends this with the metaphor of faith as “the folds of a bright girdle furl’d,” holding together the earth in a coherent embrace. One of the themes of the poem is the waning of religious beliefs and values during the 19th century. Whereas religious faith had been a relatively ubiquitous part of British and European culture in the centuries leading up to the Victorian era, new advances in scientific understanding began to create widespread religious doubt. Many critics view “Dover Beach” as a reaction to these advances, namely the theory of evolution. However, Arnold neither cites these advances nor presents arguments in favor or against them; rather, he laments the loss of the certainty and coherence afforded by faith.

The “distant northern sea” Arnold refers to is the North Sea, which lies between the United Kingdom, Northwestern Europe, and Scandinavia. The town of Dover is situated where the North Sea and the English channel connect. Arnold cites the North Sea and its distance from the Ægean in order to convey the universality of human suffering across both time and space.

It is unclear precisely what Arnold alludes to in his evocation of the “turbid ebb and flow/Of human misery” that Sophocles perceived. In a broad sense, Arnold’s phrase sums up Sophocles’s sensibilities around tragedy and fate. As a tragedian, Sophocles wrote often of human failure, futility, ignorance, and mortality. The events of his plays were undergirded with a sense of the tragedy of human life. One passage from Sophocles’s Antigone hints at Arnold’s “ebb and flow of human misery”:

Thrice blest are they who never tasted pain!
If once the curse of Heaven attaint a race,
The infection lingers on and speeds apace,
Age after age, and each the cup must drain.

So when Etesian blasts from Thrace downpour
Sweep o'er the blackening main and whirl to land
From Ocean's cavernous depths his ooze and sand,
Billow on billow thunders on the shore.

The “eternal note of sadness” emerges from the tide, bolstering the personification of the tide as a human voice singing a song. One note of that song is the “eternal note of sadness.” This note introduces one of the central themes of the poem: the timelessness of human suffering.

Since the speaker includes “to-night” in this opening line, he qualifies the sea’s quality of calm. The implication is that the sea is not always calm, but the speaker is able to experience this calmness for the present moment. This recognition establishes the important theme of how love, life, and beauty are not ever-present; they exist, and are cherished, for their transience.