Poem of the Day: Matthew Arnold

Dover Beach 

The sea is calm tonight. 

The tide is full, the moon lies fair 

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light 

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, 

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. 

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray 

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, 

Listen! you hear the grating roar 

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, 

At their return, up the high strand, 

Begin, and cease, and then again begin, 

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring 

The eternal note of sadness in. 

Sophocles long ago 

Heard it on the Aegean, 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. 

The Sea of Faith 

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore 

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. 

But now I only hear 

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 

Retreating, to the breath 

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear 

And naked shingles of the world. 

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 light, 

Nor certitude, nor peace, 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.

--Matthew Arnold 

A great poem, perhaps the only great poem Arnold ever wrote. And a quintessentially Victorian one in its disillusionment and its mourning for lost belief. Still, Anthony Hecht's cheeky response to the poem deftly takes the wind out of Arnold's rhetorical sails:

The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life 

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl 

With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them, 

And he said to her, "Try to be true to me, 

And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad 

All over, etc., etc."

Well, now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read 

Sophocles in a fairly good translation 

And caught that bitter allusion to the sea, 

But all the time he was talking she had in mind 

The notion of what his whiskers would feel like 

On the back of her neck. She told me later on 

That after a while she got to looking out 

At the lights across the channel, and felt really sad, 

Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds 

And blandishments in French and the perfumes 

And then she got really angry. To have been brought 

All the way down from London, and then be addressed 

As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort

Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty. 

Anyway, she watched him pace the room 

And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit, 

And then she said one or two unprintable things. 

But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is, 

She's really all right. I still see her once in a while 

And she always treats me right. We have a drink 

And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year 

Before I see her again, but there she is, 

Running to fat, but dependable a they come, 

And sometimes I  bring her a bottle of Nuit d'Amour.

--Anthony Hecht