Dover Beach. Calais. Swanage.

We never know which poems will set us on the road to loving poetry.  I was a late starter:  it was not until my freshman year of college that I began to sit up and take notice.  The following poem was one of my early favorites. Reading it now, I can see how a young person of an "impressionable age" could be swept along by it.  And here's the odd truth:  I am still swept along by it.

                    Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.
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, New Poems (1867).

It is the final stanza in particular which catches the fancy of the young. Who, at the age of 18 or 19, could resist its romanticism and its "Ah, World!" melancholy?  But, as I read the poem 40-odd years later, I cannot say that I find anything in it that rings hollow.  I still find it to be moving and essentially true.  Does this mean that I am in a state of perpetual adolescence?  (Something not uncommon among those of us who are members of a certain generation.  Thus, in the interest of full disclosure, I am not ashamed to admit that I have owned a number of baseball caps. However, I have never worn any of them backwards.  But I remain quite fond of "Dover Beach.")

On the other hand, "the breath of the night-wind" now attracts me more than, say, "where ignorant armies clash by night."  The historical drama has lessened.  We have all, alas, seen more than enough of that.  But, "the breath of the night-wind?"  That seems just right.

John Everett (1876-1949), "Worbarrow Bay, Dorset"

Arnold likely wrote "Dover Beach" in late June of 1851, after his marriage on June 10 of that month.  Approximately half a century earlier, in August of 1802, William Wordsworth visited Calais, just across "the straits" mentioned in the third line of Arnold's poem.  While there, Wordsworth wrote the following untitled sonnet.

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free;
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity;
The gentleness of heaven is on the Sea:
Listen! the mighty Being is awake
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder -- everlastingly.
Dear Child!  dear Girl!  that walkest with me here,
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year;
And worshipp'st at the Temple's inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.

William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes (1807).

Wordsworth (accompanied by his sister Dorothy) had gone to Calais to meet his daughter Caroline, who he had never seen.  She had been born in December of 1792 to Annette Vallon.  The Wordsworths spent the month in Calais with Caroline and Annette.  The four of them often walked along the shore.

More than one scholar has suggested that "Dover Beach" may be an echo of (or a response to) Wordsworth's sonnet.  The verbal parallels lend credence to these speculations.  As does the contrast between the spiritual certainty of Wordsworth and Arnold's meditation on the fate of "the Sea of Faith."

William Dyce, "Pegwell Bay, Kent -- A Recollection of October 5th, 1858"

My visit to these two poems was prompted by my coming across this poem by Thomas Hardy last week.  Hence, after Dover Beach and Calais, we shall make an excursion to Swanage.

                         Once at Swanage

The spray sprang up across the cusps of the moon,
        And all its light loomed green
        As a witch-flame's weirdsome sheen
At the minute of an incantation scene;
And it greened our gaze -- that night at demilune.

Roaring high and roaring low was the sea
        Behind the headland shores:
        It symboled the slamming of doors,
Or a regiment hurrying over hollow floors. . . .
And there we two stood, hands clasped; I and she!

Thomas Hardy, Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles (1925).

The poem is a recollection of the time when Hardy and his first wife Emma lived briefly in Swanage in the early years of their marriage.  The moon has a somewhat disquieting aspect in the poem, which is not unusual in Hardy's poetry.  Thus, for instance, in "At Moonrise and Onwards" he describes it as having "turned a yellow-green,/Like a large glow-worm in the sky."  Not exactly a romantic image.

William Rothenstein, "Nature's Ramparts" (1908)

Finally, a footnote to "Dover Beach" in the form of a poem by W. B. Yeats.

   The Nineteenth Century and After

Though the great song return no more
There's keen delight in what we have:
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave.

W. B. Yeats, Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (1932).

I have always presumed that Yeats had "Dover Beach" in mind when he wrote this, but I have never researched the point.  Today I checked A New Commentary on The Poems of W. B. Yeats (Macmillan 1984) by A. Norman Jeffares, but he does not mention "Dover Beach" in his annotations to the poem.  Instead, he quotes a March 2, 1929, letter from Yeats to Dorothy Shakespear (the wife of Ezra Pound) in which Yeats mentions that he has been reading William Morris' "The Defence of Guenevere."  Yeats writes:  "I have come to fear the world's last great poetical period is over."  He then includes the four lines of "The Nineteenth Century and After" in the text of the letter.  Still, it is hard not to see a parallel between Yeats' "the rattle of pebbles on the shore/Under the receding wave" and Arnold's "the grating roar/Of pebbles which the waves draw back."

Peter Graham, "Along the Cliffs" (1868)

"For Ever Gone"

I write this post with some reluctance.  This is not a current events blog.  If anything, it is intended to be a respite from current events.  Moreover, I am very conscious of not wanting to use another human being's fate for my own purposes.  I can only say in mitigation that I write this out of respect and in remembrance.

Just when we think we have "seen it all," we have not "seen it all."  And so this week we are suddenly reminded:  we will never see it all.

The question arises:  what is the appropriate human way to respond?  Of course, anyone with a ghost of decency reacts with horror and sadness to the latest outrage.  But, then, what?  I have no answers.

Peter Graham, "A Spate in the Highlands" (1866)

Recently, I have been revisiting the poetry of Edwin Muir.  In my previous post, I remarked upon his journey through the 20th century.  Last week, for the first time, I came across the following two poems by him.  The first was written during the Second World War.  The second was written in 1958, when it had become clear that the century had not yet exhausted its evil. Nothing has changed since.

Art and poetry can never be enough, of course.  I know that.  And I do not post the poems here in a vain attempt to "explain" things or to place things "in perspective."  That is impossible.  And insulting.  Which I think Muir knew.  He, like all of us, was grasping for something.

     Reading in Wartime

Boswell by my bed,
Tolstoy on my table:
Though the world has bled
For four and a half years,
And wives' and mothers' tears
Collected would be able
To water a little field
Untouched by anger and blood,
A penitential yield
Somewhere in the world;
Though in each latitude
Armies like forests fall,
The iniquitous and the good
Head over heels hurled,
And confusion over all:
Boswell's turbulent friend
And his deafening verbal strife,
Ivan Ilych's death
Tell me more about life,
The meaning and the end
Of our familiar breath,
Both being personal,
Than all the carnage can,
Retrieve the shape of man,
Lost and anonymous,
Tell me wherever I look
That not one soul can die
Of this or any clan
Who is not one of us
And has a personal tie
Perhaps to someone now
Searching an ancient book,
Folk-tale or country song
In many and many a tongue,
To find the original face,
The individual soul,
The eye, the lip, the brow
For ever gone from their place,
And gather an image whole.

Edwin Muir, The Voyage (1946).  The poem was first published on July 8, 1944, in the BBC magazine The Listener.

The first half of the poem, with its literary references, may initially prompt one to think that this will be yet another poem that attempts to resolve things by placing Life in the context of Art.  But a crucial turn occurs in exactly the middle (at line 19):  "Tell me more about life . . ."  From that point onward the poem moves steadily and movingly to another level entirely, culminating in the heartbreaking final lines, which bring us to where we ought to be.  It is not our own personal heartbreak -- the distance is unbridgeable.  But heartbreaking nonetheless.

Peter Graham, "Along the Cliffs" (1868)

                      Impersonal Calamity

Respectable men have witnessed terrible things,
And rich and poor things extraordinary,
These murder-haunted years.  Even so, even so,
Respectable men seem still respectable,
The ordinary no less ordinary,
For our inherited features cannot show
More than traditional grief and happiness
That rise from old and worn and simple springs.
How can an eye or brow
Disclose the gutted towns and the millions dead?
They have too slight an artistry.
Between us and the things that change us
A covenant long ago was set
And is prescriptive yet.
A single grief from man or God
Freely will let
Change in and bring a stern relief.
A son or daughter dead
Can bend the back or whiten the head,
Break and remould the heart,
Stiffen the face into a mask of grief.
It is an ancient art.
The impersonal calamities estrange us
From our own selves, send us abroad
In desolate thoughtlessness,
While far behind our hearts know what they know,
Yet cannot feel, nor ever express.

Edwin Muir, Collected Poems (Faber and Faber 1960).  The poem was first published in August of 1958 in The London Magazine.

"While far behind our hearts know what they know."  Is this true?  Or is it spurious consolation and/or self-protective rationalization?  But if Muir was writing about this sort of thing 50 years ago, where are we now?  The images arrive unbidden, on a daily basis, in detail.

I'm not certain if this is pertinent or not, but it comes to mind:

"Once you've experienced the infinite significance of another person's life you feel something of the same for all lives, and for your own.  There remains in the world this infinite significance and to every event we owe a responsibility.  Also we must forgive ourselves.  You can construct a universe out of that, a heaven and a hell."

P. J. Kavanagh, The Perfect Stranger (Chatto & Windus 1966).

Perhaps, in the end, it simply comes to this:

                . . . we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Philip Larkin, "The Mower."

Peter Graham, "Wandering Shadows" (1878)