Analysis Of Rolling With The Deep: Religion's Shift In Dover Beach

Rolling With the Deep: Religion’s Shift in Dover Beach Towering whitecaps hurl pebbles onto a moonlit beach like children splashing each other, as tall pale cliffs stand behind them watching; their white faces glitter with parental pride. Over and over, the shallow water is filled with the flying stones. From watching the tides, humans have thought that the Ocean is a living force due to its sudden tendency to wreak havoc with seemingly random storms. People that live today know better, and have come to appreciate the Ocean for all the benefit it provides. However, many poets do not see the sea the same as the rest of us. Take for example the poet and scholar Matthew Arnold. His poem Dover Beach is deeply pessimistic, and possesses negative

In this section, the speaker gives the Ocean a “roar”, which portrays the powerful presence of the largely unchallenged Christian faith. This “roar” is placed early on in the poem, as religion was widespread prior to the entrance of “the geology of Charles Lyell . . . [which] was forcing Europeans and Americans to rethink how life began on the planet. Lyell’s discoveries of fossils dating back more than one million years ago . . . made it difficult to accept the book of Genesis” (Ingersoll). Further on in the stanza, Arnold creates an atmosphere of darkness that sets the rest of the poem in motion through the lines “With tremulous cadence slow, and bring/The eternal note of sadness in” (Arnold). Not only do these lines set the mood, but they drastically undercut the beautiful nature scene originally depicted; not to mention creating a sense of unspecified or unrelenting sadness, as Bergquist suggests. In the second stanza, the Ocean is further depicted as the symbol of increasing Atheism through sending the reader back in time to visit with the famous tragedian Sophocles. He sees the same sights as the speaker, and “hears in the eternal flux of the waves the same dark note, “the turbid ebb and flow/ Of human misery.” Therefore, “the speaker, like Sophocles before him, perceives life as tragedy; suffering and misery are inextricable elements of existence” (Keenan).

This stanza begins with a realization from the poet: with no religion and no God, what else is there to trust but love? Humans have no God to support themselves, so other humans must do in his stead. With this realization in tow, Arnold elaborates on what life on Earth is like if humans cannot find love and God is not real in lines 31-35. The speaker now wallows in the depression that comes from losing all forms of life support, especially religion, after the tide of faith ebbs from the shoreline. The writer thrusts this harsh reality at the reader: love is only from a dream world that presents a façade of beauty, and only “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude nor peace nor help for pain” (Arnold). Because there is no God to the speaker, life without love is truly “as confusing–and as lethal–as a night battle, fraught with friendly fire” (Ingersoll) This sudden drop from the stability and the salvation a religion provides results in mass confusion, just like a combat scene in the dead of night, with hundreds of soldiers fighting, inevitably killing their own men. The light they lack – like the religion the world has lost – results in sadness, pain, and tremendous loss; for there is no Heaven to look forward