Essay on Technical Qualities, Symbolism, and Imagery of Dover Beach

Technical Qualities, Symbolism, and Imagery of Dover Beach In Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold creates a dramatic monologue of the Victorian Era that shows how perceptions can be misleading. Arnold conveys the al-Qaida of Dover Beach through three essential developments the technical qualities of the poem itself, symbolism, and imagery. The theme of deceit versus reality in Dover Beach reflects the speakers awareness of the horror between what is perceived and what truly is real. The technical qualities of the poem include rhythm and meter, rhyme, figures of speech, sound, and irony of the words. The mechanics alone do not explain why illusion and reality differ, but they do help to explain how Arnold sets up the poem to support the theme. The most prominent mechanisms include the rhythm and the meter of the lines and the stanzas of the poem. Line 1 is an iambic trimeter The sea/is calm/to-night. The gentle pulsating rhythm of the iamb mirrors the ebb and flow of the sea. The a ctual words of the first line manifest this idea to testify a calm sea gently lapping at the beach. The second line, an iambic tetramater, also reveals a calm sea. However, line 3 breaks the pattern and forces the reviewer to break his or her own rhythm. Line 3 includes Upon/the straits,//on the French/Coast/the light. The line begins and ends with an iamb, but the middle is broken up with an anapest. The anapest is a foreshadow of the tumult to come. The fourth line breaks up even farther with an anapest at the beginning, but the fifth line recovers the rhythm. Glimmering/and vast// reveal in/the tran/quil bay. The rhythm recovers by the end of the first stanza, but the original trimeter has not. The number of feet per lin... ...he speaker is supported by the rhythm and the meter, the lack of a accordant rhyme scheme, the figures of speech, the sound of the words, and the irony of the entire poem. The symbolism of the sea and the imagery of light and dark bring out the alternati ng visual and auditory qualities, which rectify on illusion and reality, respectively, Arnolds portrayal of one persons battle with illusion and reality shows a complex view of humanity in a simple poem. workings Cited Arnold, Matthew. Dover Beach. 1867 Literature. 5th ed. Eds. James H. Pickering and Jeffery D. Hoeper. Upper Saddle River, NJ Prentice, 1997. 952-53. Ciardi, John. How Does A Poem Mean? Boston Houghton, 1975. 196. Untermeyer, Louis. The Pursuit of Poetry. New York Simon & Schuster, 1969. 57-59. Walcutt, Charles Child. The Explicator. Chicago Quadrangle, 1968. 16-9.