Matthew Arnold is one of the main inspirations for the Poetry Countdown: well, Matthew Arnold and Casey Kasem. Arnold insisted that we should study “the best that has been thought and said,” partly on the theory that life is too short to do anything else. Arnold’s idea is a profoundly humanist thought, one that might scandalize a religious dogmatist or provoke the scorn of a postmodernist.
As one of the great humanists, Arnold often pictured himself alone in the world. Religious certainty eluded him, though he often wished that religion could be accepted unquestioningly. “Two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head,” wrote Arnold. “One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.” Because he couldn’t accept religion or do without it, he found himself, as he says in another poem, “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born,” and in yet another poem, he pictured each human individual as alone on an island in the middle of the “unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.”
Aside from establishing Matthew Arnold as one of the most quotable guys of the 19th century, these snippets from his writings establish a context for his greatest poem, “Dover Beach.” Here, too, he uses imagery of oceans and isolation, though somewhat in reverse: the “Sea of Faith” that was once so comforting has no withdrawn, leaving us high and dry.
The solution? There is no good solution, but the speaker of “Dover Beach” suggests that we “be true / To one another,” in a deeply humanist answer to a universe that may well make no sense at all.
This is another poem in the grand Victorian mode, like “Ulysses”, and just as noble in sentiment. Unlike “Ulysses,” though, “Dover Beach” employs a “free-rhyming” form that is looser than stanza form or blank verse. It is as if the speaker were trying out an idea that wouldn’t fit in the formulas of verse established for English by Shakespeare and Milton. In that respect, “Dover Beach” is a very “modern” poem, one that confronts uncertainties (“negative capability” again) with its own kind of plain-spoken grandeur.