A couple of days ago, I joined a poetry session on Zoom. The theme of the readings was “the sea”. I read 2 poems, one of my own, and Matthew Arnold’s fine poem, Dover Beach, which has long been one of my favourites Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold | Poetry Foundation.
Looking out to sea in the company of an unnamed woman, Arnold is reminded of “the turbid ebb and flow of human misery”. “The sea of faith” was once a powerful force holding society together,
“… But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.”
Arnold sees love as the only way to deal with the decline of moral certitude and faith. Speaking to his lover who is looking out the window towards France with him, Arnold remarks,
“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.”
After my reading there followed a discussion of Dover Beach. During the discussion someone mentioned that Anthony Hecht had written a parody of Arnold’s poem entitled The Dover Bitch. Being a curious soul I Googled Hecht’s poem https://poets.org/poem/dover-bitch.
In the poem Hecht imagines how Arnold’s lover felt as she was addressed on the subject of the decline of faith, whilst her mind was otherwise engaged
“Well now, I knew this girl. It’s true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck …”.
Hecht’s The Dover Bitch is certainly an amusing read, which is why I am sharing it here. I wonder will I ever be able to read Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach in quite the same way again!
K Morris - Poet 