Enchantment at Dover Beach

Long and Short Lines in Arnold’s “Dover Beach” 

Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold, is not a mariner’s tale but more a poem about the battle of the ocean tide in classic ebb and flow that carry the sound of centuries of battle that drift with all the rhythms of the night’s ocean that have preceded this moment. It reads like a speech carried by different lengths of meter rich in pentameter and allows for tetra, tri, and hex to offset some of the general rhythm in caesura (Sea of Faith) and emphasis. The poem’s lines leave waves of meaning but also stir the ancient sediment. The overall classic pentameter form suggests the ancient battle while the shorter lines keep the syllables and ideas condensed with the gift of anapest. Just like an ocean, in 36 lines the poem returns to form.

Near rhymes carry an unsteady rhythm. This is not the simple echo of Washington’s crossing the Delaware River but Navy ships battling like oarsman on the Aegean Sea and their ancestors brining it to rest at the rough northern Atlantic shore of Delaware.

There are enjambments that stretch lines, to even them out over the next line and to keep the flow. Lines 14–19 remind the reader through their form:

“Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.” (14–19)

Arnold utilizes three feet to a meter anapest dimeter, trimester, and pentameter to great effect to illustrate and emphasize critical elements at work such as the Greek Tragedian Sophocles, Aegean, and ebb and flow, and misery. These bits flow together with enjambment, like the tide stirring and then depositing its sand and pebbles.

He carries the rhyme of the o from Sophocles and long ago through flow at mid stanza then connects brought and thought like the peaks of the surf heard rocking towards a northern shore. The anapest of misery delivers the sound of tide and battle of our thoughts and completes what was brought from Sophocles and includes the readers with the tragedian and we and sea.

Arnold allows the reader to pause with near caesura in anapest dimeter “Retreating, to the breath” like a little tide pool and only a temporary stop before the personification of battle that the ocean carries day tide after tide:

“Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, …” (26–27)

Dover Beach

BY MATTHEW ARNOLD

The sea is calm tonight.                                       trimeter

The tide is full, the moon lies fair                           tetrameter

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light          pentameter   enjambment as the light gleams

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,        pentameter

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.           Anapest pentameter   CONSONANCE with G AND Q

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!                         Pentameter   Break here, emphasis on Come, sweet

Only, from the long line of spray                            anapest trimester   FIRST RHYME

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,           pentameter                                    STAND/LAND

Listen! you hear the grating roar                             caesura followed by trimeter

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,                  tetrameter

At their return, up the high strand,                         tetrameter (strand without saying sand)       STRAND without the mention of sand or island

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,                   pentameter   like battling waves, with sand and pebbles.

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring                  pentameter, complex internal rhyme, brilliant shaky cadence

The eternal note of sadness in.                               tetrameter

Sophocles long ago                                              anapest dimeter   effectively illustrates TWO things     ENDS AND BEGINS IN O

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought                     anapest trimester   THREE things doing action

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow                      pentameter   imperfect waves in perfect tide pattern     COMPLETES THE O

Of human misery; we                                           anapest dimeter enjambment

Find also in the sound a thought,                           anapest tetrameter, dual meaning of sound, the sound of tide and battle our thoughts                   COMPLETES THE BROUGHT FROM THE Greek Tragedian SOPHOCLES,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.                    anapest pentameter WE AND SEA

The Sea of Faith                                                 anapest monometer th’

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore     anapest pentameter

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.                pentameter

But now I only hear                                             trimeter

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,                   pentameter                                    THE FADING ROAR HEARD FROM THE SHORE, AS THE BATTLE FADES OFF

Retreating, to the breath                                        anapest dimeter

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear            hexameter

And naked shingles of the world.                            tetrameter

Ah, love, let us be true     trimeter

To one another! for the world, which seems              pentameter

To lie before us like a land of dreams,         pentameter   SEEMS/DREAMS

So various, so beautiful, so new,    anapest triameter

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, pentameter

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;   pentameter

And we are here as on a darkling plain         pentameter                                    NAKED AS THE SHINGLES in the sand, HELPLESS ON THE DARK BEACH (like a sand crab or hatchling sea turtle)

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,     hexameter

Where ignorant armies clash by night.         Pentameter   LIGHT/FLIGHT/NIGHT all that remains after the tide withdraws from the shore.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172844

Arnold, Matthew. Dover Beach. Contemporary American Poetry; Eight Edition. Edited by A. Poulin, Jr. and Waters, Michael. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. Boston. Page 220.

And February made me shiver with every paper I delivered

Responses to the Exercises:

B 2-3 (p. 164)

2. What do you notice about the use of sound in Pound’s Alba (p. 12)

Repetition of

Soft Liquids l = pale, lily, valley, lay

long u,e peaceful assonance = pale, cool, leaves, lily, valley, she, lay, beside, me

The dawn stands alone.

3. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 (375) was referred to earlier as a poem of disgust or revulsion. Point out the ugly sounds.

To point out the sounds is to point out the words as they rhyme and create meaning.

I include purpose as its P links to pursuit and possession. Together they imply greed.

Shakespeare’s genius was using sounds to elicit a sick feeling in the reader in this sonnet.

-ame generally denotes ugly sounds or concepts in verb form such as shame, frame, name, same, lame.

Expense, waste, lust, These three make me think of disgust.

Perjured, murderous, bloody, full, blame   The –ers do the work and set the reader for the ugliness of blud and bl-ame, and its full too, not just a little. A lot!

Savage, rude, cruel, not to   Savage it rips apart, it severs   Rood and CRool to boot like drool

It’s alive, an animal

Despised straight   The despicable subject has neither bend, heart, nor soul

Hunted, hated, swallowed bait   short U sound like grunt or punt, long A hated rhymes internally with bait, but swallowed like wallowed or drowned. This ugly, this clown.

Purpose, laid to make the taker mad  The stop before the assonance and consonance mingle and acknowledgement why he wrote this sonnet.

Mad in pursuit, possession   Shakespeare effectively held off the alliteration until the last to make it more powerful with a stop

Well, shun, hell   Before he releases his countenance in the sonnet’s final deuce.

C 1-12 (pp. 164-5)

Conspicous sound effect / Decide if too conspicuous or appropriate and expressive.

1. Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!

Appropriate

2. I’ll lug the guts into the neighbor room.

Appropriate

3. Oh for the night! When I in Him / Might live invisible and dim.

Appropriate

4. I saw, alas! Some dread event impend..

Expressive mixed language here. When I read alas as an exclamatory, I expect concrete to follow, not a mystery. But it does spell doom.

5. The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, / the furrow followed free; / We were the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea.

Conspicuous : borderline on inappropriate glee.

6. Over the water the old ghost strode

Appropriate assonance

7. Like some black mountain glooming huge aloof.

Appropriate, great visual descriptor,

8. A vacant sameness grays the sky

Assonance begs the question and we ask why

Appropriate

9. The mother looked him up and down, / And laughed—a scant laugh with a rattle.

Conspicuous. We don’t know why she is laughing at the boy (her son) and why her laugh contains a rattle. We do know that this image is a little grotesque, conspicuous, and inappropriate.

10. Some morning from the boulder-broken beach

Coming from Frost, we are cast into an uncomfortable and sad plane with a series of b stops to remind us that our path will not be smooth this day. This is conspicuous because it is uncomfortable like a broken down barnacle barge.

11. Tossed / by the muscular sea, / we are lost, / and glad to be lost / in troughs or rough / love.

This is appropriate to the highs and uneasy lows of love. The –ough (off) are the muscles that do the tossing so we can be lost.

12. then back to housework, / we hunched over our ironing or bunched / in froggy squats beside our soapy buckets, / backs buckling, all elbows and buttocks.

This is conspicuous and antipoetic, but beautiful in its use of hard consonance K and T and short vowels to keep it nice and ugly: buk-its, bukl-ing, el-boes, butt-ox

D 1-2 (p. 165)

1. think of ten common alliterating phrases like might and main, friend or foe, sink or swim

Dime a dozen

Silly Silo

Sell your soul

Bucking Bronco

Giggling girls

Makers Mark

Happy hooker

Jumpin Jack

Ku Klux Klan

Runnin’ Rebels

2. We discussed words beginning with sn and st. Do you find any pattern in words beginning with bl and br? Recall what words you know (blare or brisk or skim a dictionary).

(sn) kind of unpleasant vs. (st) stand steady

blanket, blond, blue, black, blizzard, blimp, blow, blare

brown, brick, brack, brawn, brave, brine, brittle, brisk

The Bl words show a little more action and some discomfort.

The Br words are solid descriptors just like St.

Another year, another tine

Five-minute valentine

Something like
a party to
we give our best
shot every time.
Sometimes when we
dodge an arrow
all the while
we walk on wounded.
But even in
the waking hour
we begin again
with a hot shower.
And next time that
we meet
I know that you
will whisper louder.
So enjoy this day
and smile and say
let’s have a toast
and extend this cheer.
Between now and then
when we meet again
this love has endured
another year.

Emotions at work and word play

Convey the experience of reading a poem as well as its meanings and technical workings.  Feel emotions and convey them to readers.

Sonnet 18  by William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buts of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest,
Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

For this poetic example of emotions running through a poem’s meanings and technical workings like oil throughout the engine or rain into the soil, the exercise of retyping instead of simply copying and pasting allowed me to fully understand its emotive context.  As I typed the words “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” it was easy to keep going because I wanted to find out what all the fuss was about.  What is the entirety of this written entity?  Yes, I have read this one before, but a very long time ago.  Yes, it is purely classic and quintessential.  Yes, I will share it with others.  Yes, I have experienced thus.

I believe William Shakespeare had encountered a maiden so pure and so fine that he knew he would have to let her go at the end of the summer.  Even after his golden complexion has dimmed by the passing of seasons, he still honors this beauty worthy of summer’s pleasant comparison after the harsh winds of spring.  He’s afraid to touch her after the rough winds had shaken the darling buds of May.  He feels sadness for the buds shaken by the rough wind of spring.  The Poet is angry at those rough winds too!  But wait  …. love is immortal.  It lasts forever, long after the shade of death, the same shade that is pleasant in the summer.  Properly, thy eternal summer shall not fade for she is the eternal summer with its enduring beauty.

His love for her transcends eternity, just as the line goes forever.  This love gives him life, despite the boast of physical possession and death.  The sadness resonates as he is forced to bid adieu to possession through death or change of season, yet feel joy because this love will endure for all of time, just like the memory of summer.  This sonnet is the essence of poetry and Shakespeare on many levels.

There is tragedy in this perfect sonnet but also an ode to joy and making it purely classic.

Shakespeare, Wiliam.  Sonnet 18.  Contemporary American Poetry; Eight Edition.  Edited by A. Poulin, Jr. and Waters, Michael.  Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.  Boston.  Page 374.

What happens at The Mill stays at The Mill

Charles A. Watson ENG 206 Withheld Image Example February 4, 2015

Withheld Image at “The Mill” by Edwin Arlington Robinson

 [ Upon further review, this poem is of a double suicide. ]

The primary withheld image of this poem is that There are no millers anymore said by the male protagonist before his “Long lingering at the door / Sick with a fear that had no form”. The mystery precedes an event into the mill that has a “warm mealy fragrance of the past.” Mealy contains a double meaning of corn or flour meal or a) with granules or b.) pale like an animal’s muzzle or bird’s plumage. Robinson alludes to a bird with ruffled feathers in line 23. The poem flows with a reminder of copulation. What are we being set up for—an encounter, a murder, a suicide?   What does a miller do?   He (or she) makes flour down at the mill by the water. What is a weir? The footnote reminds us that it is a dam like that holds water for the wheel to turn at the mill house. How many water-passing rungs are there on a typical mill wheel? This poem has twenty-four lines over its three inviting stanzas. My guess is that each rhythmic line might represent a place on the wheel. What does the black water signify? (21)   “Smooth above the weir”. The mill turns water, above a river making a waterfall and an energy source to turn the wheel. It works in tandem with a weir. Was the husband’s initial statement a shove off or an invitation for his wife to join him at the mill and its energy source? A mil is a place of rhythm reflected in the poem’s ABAB rhyme scheme and pulses the energy to keeps the wheel turning but not always grinding. The withheld images of this poem include blood, the husband, their ghosts, copulation, or possibly an event more dangerous and mysterious. Since this was written by a man in 1920, I would venture to say that their romance was rekindled with heated grinding passion at the mill, like a couple of love birds splashing at the bath. “There are no millers anymore” is code for Meet me at the millhouse where no one will be around but us. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174243 Robinson, Edwin Arlington. “The Mill”. Contemporary American Poetry; Eight Edition. Edited by A. Poulin, Jr. and Waters, Michael. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. Boston. Page 436.