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.

The English poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822–’88) was one of the leading intellectual figures of the Victorian era. A plea for unwavering constancy in a world filled with violence and in an age of dwindling faith, the poem exemplifies Arnold’s stylistic austerity and nobility of temper. Addressed to Frances Lucy Wightman, the poet’s wife, it was most likely composed in 1851, the year of their marriage.