Moonlight on the English Channel, the tide full, the cliffs gleaming white against the night. A man stands at a window in Dover, listening to the waves drag pebbles down the shore, and hears in that grating roar a note of sadness that Sophocles once heard on the Aegean. Matthew Arnold composed this poem in the early years of his marriage, yet it reads as an elegy for certainty itself, for the Sea of Faith that once lay bright and full and now withdraws with a long, retreating roar. What remains when doctrine recedes is not nothing but something more frightening: the imperative to love truly in a world that offers no guarantees. The final image of ignorant armies clashing by night has outlasted every Victorian comfort it mourned.