DANIEL BROWNtaking solace in the optimistic belief that "Nature never did betray / The
heart that loved her." 11 Half a century later In Memoriam marks the
trauma of this Romantic sensibility as nature, reconceptualized by the new
theoretical science of Laplace and Lyell, withdraws from this dialogue. This
forced retreat from a Wordsworthian communion with nature is clearly
evident in Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach," which was probably
composed in 1851 (although not published until 1867). Like In Memoriam,
"Dover Beach" is often seen as one of the representative poems of its age
because it registers a deep sense of spiritual alienation that many educated
mid-Victorians felt with the decline of Romanticism and natural theology.
But its intellectual preoccupations resonate with a later - arguably more
momentous - development in Victorian science: Charles Darwin's theory of
evolution.
"Dover Beach" is a monologue addressed to the persona's "love" (MA
29). It begins with the speaker meditating upon a scene of serene natural
beauty:
The sea is calm to-night
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! (1-6)Such an opening invites a generic response from its readers, one drawn
from their reading of such canonical Romantic poems as "Tintern Abbey,"
where nature prompts a poet's reveries and presents a stable restorative
beauty. Fixed visual imagery renders the sense of stasis in this reverie.
Hence the tableau of the sea framed by the window, which is cast in lines
that proceed slowly with a basically iambic rhythm weighed down by full
vowel sounds. But this sea is not always calm, it only happens to be so "to-
night," and is maintained in this state artificially, as a picture, through the
perpetual present tense of these lines. The quiet moonlit night is the calm
before the storm that gathers as the poem proceeds. Once we are exhorted
to focus upon the auditory effects, the reverie is broken, a transition that
the poem dramatizes with a series of onomatopoeic techniques and metrical
variations upon the established iambic pattern: "Listen! you hear the
grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves suck back and fling" (9-10). The
reversed rhythm of the trochee enhances the imperative "Listen!" Similarly,
the pyrrhic and spondaic substitutions of the second line - which contribute
to a sequence of three unstressed and three stressed syllables - mimic the
hurried movement of waves sweeping outward and then drawing back
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