So as you can imagine despite this being written between 1851-1867 it became very popular in the years between the two world wars (which was when Barber set it to music). What good poem to uplift (on to a scaffold).

Then we reach the last three lines of the poem which brings us to the second famous part: And we are here as on a darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night. It is around this point that one of the two most famous parts of the poem come up and which were I haz a sad along with Arnold but unlike him I dont throw my hands up:Sophocles long agoHeard it on the Ægæan, and it broughtInto his mind the turbid ebb and flowOf human misery weFind also in the sound a thought,Hearing it by this distant northern sea.The Sea of FaithWas once, too, at the full, and round earths shoreLay like the folds of a bright girdle furld.But now I only hearIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,Retreating, to the breathOf the night-wind, down the vast edges drearAnd naked shingles of the world.He begs his love in the last stanza to be true to him and he to her because the world they are end is like a land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain which shows us he is not of Team Optimist. It is Arnolds brooding contemplation/lament on the state of the world(read Europe) and society that has come up post-enlightenment and in the early/middle period of the industrial revolution. So now I will give my two cents on it.Matthew Arnold composed this while at the beach of the same name and while the opening lines describe the beach, the poem itself is about something else entirely. Than a few months ago I happened upon Samuel Barbers setting of the poem to music which put the poem firmly back in my mind to dwell from then on. I first heard of this poem in class over a year ago and I thought to myself well that was in interesting piece before putting it out of my mind and moving on to either The Death of Ivan Ilyich or The Metamorphosis. Dover Beach is a different poem for me because I think it is one of the most beautiful written in the english language and I disagree and/or am troubled with some, if not all, of what it is saying. On the same admission I do not usually like things I do not like-this will be an exception. I guess I will confess I do not willingly read things that I sharply disagree with or know I wont like.

Samuel barber dover beach pdf