Dover Beach

The first stanza of “Dover Beach” is a confusion of senses: sight, taste, and sound. The stanza begins with a visual description of the landscape outside the speaker’s window. The opening lines describe the sea, the moonlight, the French coast, and the White Cliffs of Dover (Lines 1-5). When the speaker calls his lover over, however, it is not to admire the view, but to taste the air: “Come to the window, sweet is the night-air” (Line 6). Only, on the next two lines, the speaker is no longer describing the air outside the window, but the sea spray far below, and he is not describing the taste of that spray. Instead, he is focused on the sound. He instructs his lover: “Listen! you hear the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling” (Lines 9-10). Since the sea is calm, the waves are small, and the pebbles are moving slowly, but ceaselessly. This “tremulous” and “slow” rhythm (Line 13) penetrates the speaker and brings: “The eternal note of sadness in” (Line 14).

Added to this confusion of senses is a confusion of rhyme. The 14 lines of the first stanza do not follow a fixed rhyme-scheme, but they do rhyme haphazardly abacdbdcefcgfg. These alternating-but-irregular rhymes add formal confusion to the sensory confusion of the stanza’s content. They also mimic the ebb and flow of the waves the stanza describes, which break and recede constantly, but in a way that is not metronomically precise. Finally, it’s important to remember that the waves, and therefore the rhymes as well, “bring / The eternal note of sadness in” (Lines 13-14). These rhymes ring like musical notes and they are sad.

When the speaker thinks of sadness at the end of the first stanza, it reminds him of Sophocles, thus the second stanza begins: “Sophocles long ago” (Line 15). Sophocles is an ancient Greek playwright famous for writing tragedies, including Oedipus Rex and Antigone. The speaker doesn’t say which tragic play by Sophocles he’s thinking of, but it’s likely Oedipus Rex, the story of a man who blinds himself rather than look at what he’s done. The dark, nighttime setting and the transition from sight to sound in the first stanza suggest Oedipus Rex. Sophocles, the speaker says, heard the same waves-meeting-beach sounds and it inspired his tragic plays: “[I]t brought / Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery” (Lines 16-18).

The implication here is that, just as Aegean waves inspired Sophocles’s tragedies, the English waves the speaker is listening to inspire “Dover Beach” (Lines 18-20). The second stanza rhymes hihjij. Like the rhymes of the first stanza, these rhymes mimic the ebb and flow of the waves.

In the next stanza, the sea becomes metaphorical instead of literal. The third stanza begins: “The Sea of Faith / Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore / Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled” (Lines 21-23). Really, there are two metaphors here. First, “Sea of Faith” (Line 21) compares religion to the ocean. Second, the ocean is compared to a “girdle” (Line 23) wrapped tightly “round earth’s shore” (Line 22). A combination of two unrelated metaphors (faith and a girdle don’t really have anything to do with one another) is called a “mixed metaphor.” Like the irregular rhymes, this mixed metaphor underscores that the speaker is mixed up.

Mixed or not, the meaning of the metaphors is clear—faith used to embrace the world tightly and make it seem more attractive, the same way a girdle embraces a woman’s body. Now though, faith is lost, so the sea is receding and the girdle is off:

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 (Lines 24-28).

In the first stanza, “roar” (Line 9) was the only end-sound without a corresponding rhyme. In the third stanza, it has two: “shore” and “roar” (Lines 22, 25). Instead of pleasure or comfort, however, this repetition leaves the speaker lonely and sad because the “roar” is the sound of faith “withdrawing” (Line 25). The third stanza rhymes kelmeomn. That is an even more haphazard rhyme scheme than the stanzas before.

The fourth and final stanza presents a solution to this loneliness: “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!” (Lines 29-30). This is the only truth that the speaker, his lover, or the poem are able to find, because the 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

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night (Lines 33-37).

This final stanza calls back to the first stanza in two important ways. First, like the first stanza, the final stanza ends with sounds in the dark. In the first stanza, those sounds were the nighttime sounds of waves scraping pebbles across the beach. In the final stanza, those sounds are wartime sounds of “ignorant armies” (Line 37) fighting at night. Second, the sound from the first line and the third line of the first stanza is repeated three times in the final stanza and twice in the last two lines, so the final stanza rhymes: oppoaqqaa. In these two ways, the final stanza seems to be saying that nothing has changed since the opening stanza. In one important way, however, everything has changed—instead of haphazard rhymes, the final stanza follows a distinct and regular rhyme pattern: oppoaqqaa. This is the same rhyme pattern as the first eight lines of an Italian sonnet, plus a ninth line that rhymes with Line 8, so the stanza ends on a rhyming couplet. The regular, patterned rhymes of the final stanza suggest that the lovers will be true, and their fidelity will add some order and stability to a confused and chaotic world.