Dover Beach

Listen, the poem says, and the calm of the moonlit strait gives way to a sound: pebbles dragged down the shingle by the receding wave and flung up again, a grating roar that brings "the eternal note of sadness in." Matthew Arnold heard in that note what Sophocles heard long ago on the Aegean, and beneath it he hears the thing the whole poem is built to mourn: the Sea of Faith, once at the full and folded round the earth like a bright girdle, now drawing back down the vast edges of the world with a melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. With nothing left to guarantee the world's goodness, Arnold turns from the window to the one person beside him and makes the smallest, most human plea there is: ah, love, let us be true to one another. For the land of dreams before them has really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain, only a darkling plain swept by confused alarms, where ignorant armies clash by night.