Write a note on the elements of melancholy in "Dover Beach".

"Dover Beach", written by Matthew Arnold, a famous elegiac poet, critic, and educationalist of the Victorian era, was published in 1867 when the countryEngland was torn between science and religion, between  Romanticism and Classicism, between materialism and spiritualism. This poem us a vehement picture of the poet's melancholic view of life as well as the representation of Victorian loss of faith as a consequence of the rapid growth of science and commerce with the publication of Darwin's "The Origin of Species" in 1859.


             An elegy is a poem of mourning or a song of lamentation. And Arnold is a poet of melancholy and in this respect he is definitely different from his great contemporaries, like Tennyson, Browning. His well - known poems like "The Scholar Gipsy", "Rugby Chapel", "Thyrsis" bear thoroughly his melancholic and elegiac tone.


           Arnold's elegiac note is also predominant in "Dover Beach" as usual. The poet is found to lament here not for the death of any person, but for the loss of the simple faith and for the loss of beauty and culture in the prevalent situation. He laments deeply for this state of the present age that has ".....neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain."


         In "Dover Beach", Arnold's melancholic view is distinct, penetrative, yet tender. Set against the scenic charm of the Northern sea near Dover Beach, the poem contains a good deal of gloomy reflections of modern life. But here, in this poem the sea is not merely a background, but a symbol of religious faith and its 'grating roar' symbolizes the decline of the faith. Being a Victorian pessimist to the core, the poet perceives the crumbling away of religious faith during his time. He now hears 'the eternal note of sadness'. He mourns the fact that "The sea of Faith/ Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore/ Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd," but now he hears only "Its melancholy."


           Not only our poet, but also, the Greek tragedian Sophocles heard the same sound of melancholy long ago :
        "Sophocles long ago
         Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
         Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
         Of human misery."


             At the end of the poem, the poet says that the world appeared to be a dreamland of beauty in past, but now ----
        "We are here as on a darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle  and fight/ Where ignorant armies clash by night."
The pessimism of these lines is hardly to be paralleled in literature.It may surpass even that of Hardy, the prince among the pessimistic writers.


          Melancholy is a key element in Arnold's poem and is also a part of his moral and intellectual approach to life as known to and seen by him in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, that was so impressive an affair in the Victorian world yet confounding, chaotic,and degenerating in the ultimate turn of events.


         Nothing could be more profoundly melancholy than the present poem "Dover Beach", "yet there is nothing maudlin, nothing unmanly about it."(Rickett). In the words of H. W. Paul, "Profoundly melancholy in tone it expresses the peculiar turn of Mr. Arnold's mind, at once religious and sceptical, philosophical and emotional, better than his formal treatises on philosophy and religion. In spite of the loss of religious faith, Arnold does not loss his heart, as he still finds consolation, a heaven of rest and peace, in true love."