Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach is a splendid poem, full of deep, melancholic beauty. For him it was about the loss of faith and the decay of tradition. For me the meaning casts wider: it’s about a world with no point of reference whatsoever. The last verse in particular makes me so sad.
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 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.
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Certainly, one of the grandest and most melancholy of all poems. A friend in college had the final stanza inscribed in a locket which he gave as a gift to his fiancee. Arnold and his contemporaries were devastated by the prospect of a universe devoid of God. One gets a glimpse of the same pessimistic vision of bereft humanity in Thomas Hardy's novels.
ReplyDeleteYes, indeed. Thanks, NP.
ReplyDeleteAs suddenly as the fall of Icarus and as if from nowhere this 'God whimpering' in all its silent and numb negation stares the daemon lover to a harrowing mental sound of sibilance: whose sentiments and emotions are unreciprocated, or impossible to match or satisfy: 'But the really reckless were fetched / By an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper:
ReplyDelete"I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;
That is how I shall set you free. There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad."
More terrible this time than the 'God Whimpering' more bloody-minded but more God-like. It is the same whimper of the Kadosh, the mysterious and terrifying other of God, the Black Goddess. In Christianity it is known as the mysterium terrible et fascinans. The Limestone harmony of poetic impossibility in the Valeryian sense. which vanishes away just as it is catched gives poetry its frivolous tone. We can laugh at the contrasts with the male leaning against a rock 'displaying his dildo' in Auden's famous poem. But Thekla Clark mentioned an actual postcard that Auden showed around of a nude teenager leaning on a rock 'Wanking at the sun.'
"ENOUGH!"
Wonderful. :-)
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