Dover Beach Explication
The speaker in Dover Beach is talking to his lover. Arnold wrote this poem while he was on his honeymoon, therefore this was obviously a very important and special place for him. Let's begin with the title. The Oxford English Dictionary defines dover as an unsettled sleep. But in the context of this poem, Dover refers not to an unsettled sleep, but to a setting. At the narrowest point on the English Channel, the light on the French coast is about twenty miles away. Since Dover Beach is on the coast of England, right near the English Channel, one would presume that when battles that took place in England, armies entered through the English Channel, quite possibly on that very beach. Dover Beach, being a place of battle, seems to be the perfect setting for a poem that relates to human misery and suffering. In the first line of the first stanza, the word "sea" is a parallel to human nature and human history. The sea rises and crashes, human misery rises and falls. Happiness in life in the world "gl
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Another important shift in this poem, takes place from the first stanza, to the last. The opening landscape is a real landscape. The images are crisp and clear, and it provokes independent reality. The closing landscape has no external referents; it exists only in the exacerbated consciousness of the speaker. The most major point of Dover Beach was in accordance to human misery. Life isn't easy and we must be there for each other when all else lost. In lines 15-18, "Sophocles long ago heard it on the Aegean, and it brought into his mind the turbid ebb and flow of human misery," Arnold makes a reference to Antigone. In lines 637- 646, the chorus compares the fate of the house of Oedipus to the waves of the sea. Sophocles used waves to underscore the doom of Oedipus' family and home. The "ebbing" is the assertion by the affections of their mastery over the intellect in supplying a ground of confidence when it's assurance fails. Culler, A. Dwight. P
Some common words found in the essay are:
Dover Beach, English Dictionary, Athenians Syracusians, English Channel, Tober-na-volich IX, ESC Weiner, Clarendon Press, dover beach, University Press, english dictionary, Oxford English, oxford english, oxford english dictionary, human misery, english channel, Mifflin Company, ed oxford clarendon, weiner 2nd, esc weiner, unsettled sleep, clarendon press 1989, ed oxford, oxford clarendon press, 2nd ed oxford, 2nd ed,
Approximate Word count = 700
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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