teaching "Dover Beach" again. and again.

I am wrapping up Fahrenheit 451 with my freshmen this week, and we've spent some time talking about the scene when Montag reads a snippet of Arnold's "Dover Beach" to his wife's vapid friends. Having lived in a society deprived of poetry, beauty, and intimacy (can you imagine??), one of the women begins to sob uncontrollably at his words. My students want to know: is she grateful? disturbed? overwhelmed? furious? Maybe all of these. At any rate, I thought about the fact that "Dover Beach" is the poem I teach continually. I'm always referencing it. When I was prepping for Fahrenheit I had decided to whip out this poem, and I hadn't even reached the part where Montag actually reads it. Hemingway, Wharton, Bowles, Shakespeare - they all address its central conflict, the danger in and the hopefulness of its resolution.

So here it is, my back-pocket poem.

DOVER BEACH

By Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight,
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 land,
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 Agean, 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.

1867