Dover Beach

Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach is another poem in which the speaker is deep in thought. As the speaker and his love are standing and adoring the English Channel, the speaker begins to come to a realization. He determines that although the water (and all of the world) may look beautiful and calm, it is actually sad and miserable. He ponders even deeper by expressing that there is this same emotion all over the world to all humanity. The speaker himself has lost all faith in humanity. He exemplifies this when he proclaims that there is a dwindling amount of faith in the world itself! "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" (Arnold, 893). The speaker's list of the miseries of life goes on and on. It's length and detail show his position on the quality of the world. He even acknowledges that he has lost faith. To compensate for not having any faith, he exclaims to his love that they must stick together forever. Without this woman, I feel he would become a deeply disturbed man. The terms he uses to describe the world and humanity are pessimistic and depressing enough. Without the speaker's only joy in life, I believe he would crumble without faith.