Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins

The socially disruptive "domestic shocks of mass hardship and the Chartist movement" once Arnold was in his twenties and the later "European shocks from the revolutions of 1848" contributed to Arnold's growing sense that change was, to your moment, inevitable and stability was out of reach. Hamilton, who connects "Dover Beach" in the occasion of Arnold's marriage a few years later, views the poem as reflecting the exact same attitude displayed by Arnold in "Stanzas during the Grand Chartreuse," a poem written on his honeymoon trip. In that poem Arnold, moved to "pits of cultural despair" during his visit to the overwhelming French monastery, saw no hope inside the supply and was not at all sure around the future (Hamilton 144). Inside "Stanzas" he speculates that "Years hence, perhaps, may perhaps dawn an age / Additional fortunate, alas! than we" and he asks posterity to merely "leave our desert to it peace" (quoted in Hamilton 144).

This despairing attitude within the desert of European culture seems an unlikely theme in your poem written on or about his honeymoon. But, as Trilling and Bloom note, if it was written earlier it may well reflect the poet's "anguish about Marguerite," the mysterious French woman from whom he had to part (593). Even dating the poem a few many years later, however, doesn't rule out a trace of his regret more than Marguerite, as well as the barrier that exists in between France and England during the first.

But even if human beings have grown utilized for the earth, and seldom think anymore about how the divine is implicit in all the points they eat and make within the earth, you can find nonetheless signs of God's immanence that should be plain to them. To demonstrate this Hopkins provides a personal vision with the divine in nature--one with an immediacy and warmth that are startling because they not merely return the reader for the explicitly mentioned notion with the presence with the "grandeur of God" with which "the world is charged", they also flesh it out really vividly (1). First Hopkins says that "though the last lights off the black West went" the dawn comes up inevitably to take their place (11). The morning "springs" on a earth "Because the Holy Ghost more than the bent / Globe broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings" (13-4).

Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London: Routledge, 1996.

Because Arnold writes from a view more than the world, taking in the flow of history from Sophocles to the present, his diction and rhythms are very impersonal and grand. The immediacy of the scene-setting within the first stanza is pretty simple: "The sea is calm tonight / The tide is full, the moon lies fair / Upon the straits" (1-3). The view extends, at first, across to France and, as the lights from the French coast gradually disappear, the beauty on the immediate view prompts the speaker to call his companion on the window in which the air is sweet. On seeking at the shoreline and listening to the repetitive ebb and flow, however, the speaker launches over a series of plain words that vividly recreate the repetitive movement on the sea: draw back, fling, return, up, begin, cease, then, again, begin. The movement becomes almost trance-like as it descends to a crawl of the words "tremulous cadence slow" (13), and out of this contemplation with the endless.

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