Writer’s Intro
Matthew Arnold, (1822-1888) a major Victorian Poet. He was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools.
Theme
Dover Beach deals with the theme of the struggle of faith where Christianity and humane faith are on the wane due to the increase of scientific advancement.
Dover Beach Summary
Intro of Dover Beach Summary
In Dover Beach summary we can see the narrator of “Dover Beach” spends the night in a house in Dover with a lady, where they gaze out over the English Channel. The sea is still and peaceful, and they can see the lights of the French coast from twenty miles away.
We start the main part summary
A sudden blackout in France prompts the speaker to survey the serene English counterpart. Instead of focusing on visual details, he shifts his attention to auditory ones, such as the “grating roar” of the pebbles being dragged out by the waves. After the opening stanza, he declares that all music carries an “eternal note of grief.”
In the following stanza, we travel back in time to ancient Greece, where Sophocles heard this identical sound on the Aegean Sea and was inspired to write plays about the suffering of the people of that time.
The third line of stanza three, “The Sea of Faith/Was once, too, full and around the earth’s shore,” is the poem’s central metaphor. The faith of the people is ebbing away like the tide, as implied by the expression. A tone of sadness permeates the speaker’s description of this disillusionment.
Last part Summary of Dover Beach
The final stanza features an intimate conversation between the speaker and his beloved, in which he pleads with her to be loyal to him and the world around them at all times. However, he cautions, this beautiful environment is really an illusion; in reality, it is a battleground wherever people fight in the pitch black.
This is the end of our content Dover beach summary. Thank you for reading the content. Anyway, if you want to read more summaries from Restoration and Eighteenth Century Fiction, please check the following articles:
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