Essay on Dover Beach

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I have struggled with the concept of a benevolent "God" or "higher power" all my life. Although that concept is now a part of my personal philosophy and is at the heart of how I define myself as a human being, the years that it took to arrive at that state were every bit as rocky as the shore of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach."

The author uses the audio and visual imagery of pebbles on a beach to describe a philosophical journey. He hears the "eternal note of sadness" (671, line 14) in the sounds of the waves of Dover beach, and concludes that there is no God, no peace, and no end to pain. This humanist view may be his paradigm at the dawn of the industrial age, when God was slowly being replaced by science. It may also be the result of feeling cheated by a religious system that promises truth and delivers hypocrisy, as has been my experience.

Regardless of the cause, he is clearly disenchanted with a faith that once rang true to him, and of which he now hears only, "...it's melancholy, long, withdrawing roar."(671, line 25) Nothing else but his relationship with his lover holds a promise of inner peace or an end to human misery. He claims that even the ancients knew of the endless cycle of human despair, and says that "Sophocles long ago/heard it on the Aegean, and it brought/into his mind the turbid ebb and flow/of human misery."(671, lines 15-18) This journey is not unlike my own, though with a different ending.

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The author doesn't elaborate on why he sees the "Sea of Faith retreating,"(671, line 21) but it is something he once held dear to his heart, "...like the folds of a bright girdle furled."(671, line 23) To arrive at that emotional view of faith, he must have made a spiritual decision at some point in his life. He chose to turn his back on faith in something greater than himself. In making my decision, it was always tempting to choose what I could touch, taste and smell over a theological dogma that promised intangible things. Inner peace and life after death are hard to rely on when you feel lied to by those who espouse it. My journey has also been at this all-time low he describes, and I have often felt that there truly was no real peace to be found in faith.

These feelings were often brought on by the outside world, such as when I would hear of an atrocity that shook my faith. I became angry with a God that would allow the Nazis to perpetrate genocide against the Jews or allow a mother to murder her children to keep her boyfriend around. The author may have chosen Dover Beach for similar reasons. It was the spot of land in which William the Conqueror crossed to stamp out the Saxons, and was where both Napoleon and Hitler planned to cross the channel. Such things can easily shake one's confidence in a benevolent, loving God.

Although I have shared many of his doubts, our journeys have different endings. He concludes his journey by telling his lover that "…the world, which seems/to lie before us like a land of dreams/ so various, so beautiful, so new/hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light/…and we are here as on a darkling plain."(672, lines 30-35) He clearly sees life as a cycle of misery in which pain and loss will inevitably return in time. I see life as an opportunity to grow, and I take comfort from the same things he is saddened by. If I had chosen to turn away from my faith and sought comfort solely in human companionship, I believe I would also hear the endless sound of human misery in the pebbles on the beach. My journey led to a different conclusion, however. I choose to hear the wonder of nature.

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