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Mathew Arnold's “Dover Beach” (written in 1876) is one of the most beautiful poems in the English language. Beautiful for its music and its imagery. For its historical scope and philosophical clarity. For its honest ambivalence: optimism against pessimism. For the way it sets the beauty of the natural world against the melancholy of loss-and against uncertainty and existential anxiety. For its meditation on what love can mean.
To appreciate the poetry of another age is to overcome some difficulties. The unstated assumptions and the intellectual struggles of that age, the ground against which the figure of the poem is set, may well be opaque to us. Readers may remember that Matthew Arnold was a Victorian poet, essayist, and literary critic. The great thinkers of his time wanted to make the world right with new science and technology, with new social, psychological, and economic theory, with cultural development generally. This was the age of Darwin, Marx, and soon Freud. But the dark side of belief in progress is doubt-of optimism, pessimism.
The poets of Arnold's age sought spiritual truth, and the beauty that signaled it, in a world undergoing deeply unsettling technological, social, economic, and religious change. And lurking within the celebration of the Beautiful was the anxiety that beauty could be glimpsed only briefly and thus couldn't be relied upon. The great Romantic, William Wordsworth, as early as 1798 (in “Tintern Abbey”), celebrated the memory of his youthful communion with the natural world. But even as he celebrated, he felt himself (only five years later!) already past the possibility of such communion. Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1877 (in “God's Grandeur”) would insist eloquently on the spiritual beauty of the world even as he bemoaned its despoliation. The world he saw was “seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; and wears man's smudge.” At the risk of simplifying a large and complex history: this was an age that wanted to believe but was oppre