Matthew Arnold

’s Dover Beach And Self-Dependece Essay, Research Paper

Matthew Arnold s

Dover Beach and Self-Dependence

Matthew Arnold was born at Laleham on the Thames, the eldest son of Thomas Arnold, in 1822. He had to live in the shadow of his famous father who ran the Rugby school beginning in 1828. He went to the Rugby school since age 6, but his achievement were inconsistent. He got a scholarship to Oxford anyway in 1841. School came easy to him there. His father died in 1842 of a heart attack. In 1844 he was awarded second honors in Oriel College Oxford, to the disbelief of his friends. That year he also taught at Rugby for one year. He later came back to Oxford in 1846. He married and had children. He worked as an inspector of schools, to support his family. He wrote many books of poetry and essays. He went on two tours of America to do Lectures. He later died of a heart attack, in Liverpool, in 1888.

Matthew Arnold lived during the Victorian period. For much of this century the term Victorian, which literally describes things and events in the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), conveyed connotations of “prudish,” “repressed,” and “old fashioned.” Although such associations have some basis in fact, they do not adequately indicate the nature of this complex, paradoxical age that was a second English Renaissance. In science and technology, the Victorians invented the modern idea of invention — the notion that one can create solutions to problems, that man can create new means of bettering himself and his environment. In religion, the Victorians experienced a great age of doubt, the first that called into question institutional Christianity on such a large scale. In literature and the other arts, the Victorians attempted to combine Romantic emphases upon self, emotion, and imagination with Neoclassical ones upon the public role of art and a corollary responsibility of the artist.

New types of poetry were surfacing, scholars at Oxford and Cambridge began writing in lyrics, narratives, verse, dramas, epics, and prose. In 1857 Matthew Arnold was offered a position, which he accepted and held until 1867, as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Arnold became the first professor to lecture in English rather than Latin. During this time Arnold wrote the bulk of his most famous critical works. Meditative and rhetorical, Arnold’s poetry often wrestles with problems of psychological isolation. Poems such as “Dover Beach,” link the problem of isolation with what Arnold saw as the dwindling faith of his time. Despite his own religious doubts, a source of great anxiety for him, in several essays Arnold sought to establish the essential truth of Christianity. His most influential essays, however, were those on literary topics. Arnold called for a new epic poetry: a poetry that would address the moral needs of his readers, “to animate and ennoble them.” Arnold’s arguments, for a renewed religious faith and an adoption of classical aesthetics and morals, are particularly representative of mainstream Victorian intellectual concerns. His approach–his gentlemanly and subtle style–to these issues, however, established criticism as an art form, and has influenced almost every major English critic since, including T. S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, and Harold Bloom. Though perhaps less obvious, the tremendous influence of his poetry, which addresses the poet’s most innermost feelings with complete clearness, can easily be seen in writers as different from each other as W. B. Yeats, James Wright, Sylvia Plath, and Sharon Olds.

Dover Beach, written in 1867, is Matthew Arnold s complaint on the loss of Christianity and a fear of being alone. Arnold shows this through literary techniques. The poem is written in free verse with no particular meter or rhyme scheme, although some of the words do rhyme. He uses imagery in the poem to describe the setting and mood. The poem begins two-part stanzas, the first that is promising and hopeful; the second replaces optimism with a reality that is grim. Arnold uses contrast when he appeals to the sense of sight in the first section and to hearing in the second. He uses alliteration of f in line 2, and the g in line 4 to make the opening of the poem happier, and give it more of a flow. He uses diction to change the mood. At first he uses words like calm , fair , tranquil , and sweet , but then he uses words like grating roar , fling , changing the mood from happy and calm to desperate and depressing. Arnold uses repetition in lines 32 and 33, of so and nor to emphasize how great the land was but now how bad it has become. He uses a simile in line 23; Lay like the folds of a bright girdle , meaning the sea of faith encompassed everything like a circle, but now its far off in the center, seen only from afar. He uses archetypes, such as the circle, which shows wholeness, unity, and union. Other archetypes are the sea, which represents faith, death, rebirth, and timelessness. The wind shows inspiration and soul.

Arnold starts with the descriptions of the “calm sea”, “fair tide” and the “vast” cliffs that create a calming, innocent appearance. This sets the mood of peace and contentment that the speaker feels when he gazes out upon the sea. “Come to the window, sweet is the night-air”, gives the reader the impression of a cool, summer night. The mood begins as soothing and calming to the reader. Arnold then however, begins to change the