Connecting to Poetry: Dover Beach by Mathew Arnold

Today I started my journey towards understanding poetry. The one genre I've always found hardest to understand. Let me tell you why. Later on, I'll tell you something that I picked today from an article by Ms Virginie Greene ["Three Approaches to Poetry", PMLA, 125, no 1, January 2005: 219-234. You'll be able to read it online if you have access to JSTOR].  The first poem I'm going to analyse is Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold.

It will be great if you could sit in a garden with a poetry book and just read it and get it while clouds float in the blue sky and birds chirp. But that doesn't happen with people like me. First of all, people like me, say, those who don't know German, don't instinctively get what Plath's "Ich Ich Ich" means (Daddy, Sylvia Plath). I don't know other languages, I don't get Biblical references, I don't know absolutely everything about every Greek or Roman god. So for me, reading a poem, really reading, takes a lot of commitment.

The second problem is more complex. Even when I get a poem's meaning, I have to read other people's critical analyses to really get it's soul. Although I myself write poetry and I've read thousands of the world's most famous poems, I have instantaneously understood very few poems in my life.

The first problem can only be addressed by reading, and more reading. The second, well, that requires sensitising oneself to the language of poetry.

I say 'sensitising' because poetry is really a wordplay of sensations. Dover Beach is a good example of how this works. You first see: 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. It's a beautiful sight. And then you smell: Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Again, it's all beauty. And then you finally listen:
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.

Ok, now it has turned disturbing. It's the same scenery, but there are undertones of wrath and sorrow. And that's it.

But that's only half-way getting through the poem's soul. The other half is relating. Has beauty ever made you sad? Some may say yes, because beauty is ephemeral. But that's not what the poet is talking about here (later on he says the sea was the same ages ago). He's saying, that even when it is lasting, there is a tragedy to the beauty of this world. What is that tragedy? It is the turbid ebb and flow/Of human misery. But what caused this misery? There's more to see:

The Sea of Faith... 
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.

He's comparing faith to a garment. It is now gone, and the naked shingles of the earth are exposed. Perhaps that is what has caused the grating roar in the second stanza.

The poet has lost his faith. And that is why the beautiful scenery makes him melancholy. That happens to everyone. A lovely rainy day can make you sad, when you don't have faith that life can be good.

This is where I would like to refer to something beautiful I read in Ms Greene's article today. Talking about a poem, she says that understanding a poem isn't really an understanding of the poem. It is an "understanding through the poem" of something that we have subconsciously known before. Reading poetry really is finding a connection between the poem and our lives.

So with this, I end today's post. Reading about how to read poetry is something I never did before. It was pure joy.

Happy reading!