Our “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”

My experience with poetry and poets has convinced me that each poet has one great poem in her or him. The odd thing about the phenomenon is that the great poem is usually the least complex, most straightforward and shortest in the repertoire. Such is the case for Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach".

In the midst of our current national malaise, the simple, singular sense of dread in the poem resonates with our experience. As a poet, Arnold, like most Victorians, I suppose, has drifted into a kind of literary neverland, well beyond the reach of our contemporary needs, wants and, especially, sensibilities. And yet, compared with the majority of his contemporaries, he stood among the elite, not only as a poet, but also, perhaps especially, as an essayist. As revealed in many of his famous essays, he was not very much pleased with how the empire was running amok, extending its reach far beyond its grasp and fundamentally ignoring its domestic social disparities

This poem came back to me when its final line flashed through my mind—“where ignorant armies clash by night.” At that moment I was not thinking so much about the general futility and ignorance (“We don’t know what we don’t know.”) of war as I was of the general futility and ignorance within our political and cultural institutions we are currently experiencing (to our eternal chagrin and embarrassment), particularly in the way they continue to exacerbate our domestic social disparities.

And I was glad that I had searched the poem, punched it up and read it once again. The reference to the two lovers in the context I think is particularly poignant. Lovers generally feel insular, but within the circumstances of the poem, the insularity implies a certain sense of isolation and fear. The third stanza suggests this feeling. A “Sea of Faith” has been changed to a sea of “melancholy” with its “long, withdrawing roar/ Retreating, to the breath/
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear/
And naked shingles of the world.” This changed world “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.”

I guess the feeling of those lines just quoted is the feeling that took me back to the poem. That is how I’m feeling about the world we have made for ourselves recently. Everywhere we turn on this “darkling plain” we see beaters, cheaters, three-piece criminals, blathering and bloviating pundits, high-priced scoff lawyers, unthinking, unknowing educational specialists and on and on. I can only hope that somewhere at some isolated place on this plain are two lovers hugging each other for dear life.

BTW—"Destiny is not a matter of chance, but of choice, not something to wish for, but to attain." -- William Jennings Bryan