Dover Beach- Blog 4

Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold uses the descriptions of three large bodies of water to eventually give a lesson to the world to hold on to what we do have in this world- each other. Nothing else is as it seems, as we see in the images of the bodies of water. The English Channel is my personal favorite of the stanzas because of its contrast of the calm setting in sight but destructive and loud sound. The " Glimmering and vast, out in tranquil bay" (Line 5) is the opposite of the "grating roar" (line 9) of the sea. Then the second stanza describing the Aegean Sea as the "turbid ebb and flow of human misery" (line 17-18) is a way for the speaker to prove that he is not the only one who notices the misery of the sea. Sophocles, too, noticed this about the Aegean Sea. Lastly, the Sea of Faith- a figurative sea- used to be full and bright, but now there is so much less of it in the world because it is being drained. The misery still does not go away. The images of misery in all of these bodies of water were building up to the fourth stanza where the speaker maintains that they need to hold on to each other. Surrounded by a world of destructions, they have to rely on each other for a constant.