Victorian poetry and scienceslowly and powerfully before the quickened momentum of the final iambic
foot. We are thrust into a world familiar to us from Tennyson, a world of
fluctuating, treacherous, and violent natural process.
Bereft of the old grounds of faith, the persona of "Dover Beach" scales
down the demands that he makes upon the external 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. (29-37)Here truth no longer exists in a direct correspondence between the subject
and the object world of nature (conceived of either as a Romantic pantheist
principle or as the Creation of natural theology). Instead, truth inhabits the
relation between the subject and another person who can be trusted to share
a private vision and reflect one's selfhood. While the reciprocating subjectiv-
ities of the lovers can "be true / To one another," the external "world...
seems," in an interesting pun, "To lie before us." Arnold's speaker presents
the Romantic perception of a benign and beautiful world as mere solipsism.
Its existence is conditional upon its viewer; it only "seems" and is "like" an
imaginary vision, "a land of dreams" that may be more accurately described
as a "lie." Tennyson's idealist metaphor of the phenomenal world as a "veil"
- a "veil" behind which "answer, or redress," may be found to affirm his
vision (LVI, 28, 27) - has been reversed. Transformed by their vision, the
world that "lie[s]" before the lovers is ultimately a veil that obscures the
truth of a disturbing, if not vicious, reality.
Placed prominently at the beginning of the second volume of Lyell's
Principles of Geology is a fold-out map that illustrates the dramatic change
over geological time of "the space occupied by Europe, from the conditions
of an ocean interspersed with islands to that of a large continent." 12 Arnold
uses the phenomenon figuratively to describe a gradual waning of religious
belief: "The sea of faith / Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
/ Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd" (21-23). The chalk cliffs of
Dover certainly provide spectacular evidence of the Lyellian process of
erosion. But the poem describes another instance of this process in "the
grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves suck back, and fling." Indeed,
this "roar" can be identified as a treacherous Lyellian undertow to "The sea
of faith": "Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" (21, 25). Caught in the