Conflicting Definitions, The Lovely Oxford English Dictionary And Aphra Behn’s ‘The Willing Mistress’

I’ve been saying in previous posts that the first thing to do when reading a poem is to work out the speech situation, but I realize now I am an idiot. What is the first thing you do when you read something? Read the title of course. Please accept my apologies for being so dense.

Anyway, the title. Clearly ‘The Willing Mistress’ overtly states from the start the theme of the poem; female sexuality was not a myth in the 17th century but truly did exist. However, what I want to focus on is the word ‘mistress’ – this word has a lot of different and sometimes conflicting definitions.

If you open a dictionary you have lying around, you will get one, maybe two, meanings of the word. That is because the little dictionary sitting on your shelf (or even the very big dictionary you have sitting on your shelf) can in no way hold all of the millions of words and all of the many definitions of each word that make up the English language. It just can’t happen.

Thankfully, we have the privilege to live in the 21st century and have access to the beautiful invention that is the internet (I am assuming you have access to the internet, what with this being an internet blog…). So, go to Google and type in OED and ta-da! you will find you suddenly have too many definitions of a word to even comprehend, around 75% of which will not be applicable to the text you are reading. So what the hell do you do now?

Let’s use ‘The Willing Mistress’ as our example, specifically that word ‘Mistress’. Type it into the OED now. Already we have two options to chose from; in the context of the sentence ‘the willing mistress’, ‘mistress’ is clearly a noun and so we want the first option.

Now we’ve got that far, we obviously have a lot of entries. The simplest way to narrow this down is to see which definitions can fit in the context of our sentence and the poem in general (while ‘the willing childminder’ fits the sentence, I don’t really think it works in the context of the whole poem…). What you will notice, however, is that below each definition, the OED online includes a brief history of the usage of the word (with the appropriate definition) in literature. The main benefit of this, of course, is that we can see which meanings were around when the poem was written; it is no use trying to claim that Ahpra Behn meant ‘a woman who plays the dominant role in sadomasochistic sexual activity’ even if you could find a way to apply it to the text because that meaning of the word ‘mistress’ was not used until 1921, long after Behn wrote ‘The Willing Mistress’.

So what definitions fit the context and the date of the poem? ‘A woman having control or authority’, certainly, along with ‘a woman who has the power to control, use, or dispose of something at will’, ‘a female possessor or owner of something’ (her body, sexuality, virginity etc.), ‘a woman loved and courted by a man; a female sweetheart’ and of course ‘a woman other than his wife with whom a man has a long-lasting sexual relationship’.

As we can see some of these definitions (specifically the final two) may slightly contradict each other and so we would have to carefully analyze the rest of the poem in order to find which one (or ones) are most applicable. However, I hope this makes it clear that checking definitions for poems (especially those written a long time ago) is extremely important in revealing the meaning behind the poem.

Aphra Behn – The Willing Mistress

Note the tone Stella Gonet uses to portray the mistress’ willingness; not only is she willing, but fairly into the goings on.

Aphra Behn – The Willing Mistress (1680)

Amyntas led me to a Grove,
Where all the Trees did shade us;
The Sun it self, though it had Strove,
It could not have betray’d us:
The place secur’d from humane Eyes,
No other fear allows,
But when the Winds that gently rise,
Doe Kiss the yielding Boughs.

Down there we satt upon the Moss,
And did begin to play
A Thousand Amorous Tricks, to pass
The heat of all the day.
A many Kisses he did give:
And I return’d the same
Which made me willing to receive
That which I dare not name.
His Charming Eyes no Aid requir’d
To tell their softning Tale;
On her that was already fir’d,
‘Twas Easy to prevaile.
He did but Kiss and Clasp me round,
Whilst those his thoughts Exprest:
And lay’d me gently on the Ground:
Ah who can guess the rest?

The Structure and Form of ‘Evening Twilight’

This poem is interesting in regards to form because it deviates from regular patterns ever so slightly in certain places in order to achieve very specific effects.

Note first of all the rhythm of the piece; while there is a regular beat, it cannot be defined in a regular metrical foot because this keeps changing throughout, between iambic and trochaic meter and between pentameter, hexameter and even heptameter sometimes. What this achieves is a sense of uneasiness, a wariness that makes something feel out of place – the beats are so regular, you would expect the rhythm to be the same but it is not. This wariness mirrors the emotions of the speaker, who is clearly not comfortable passing through such surroundings. It can also be argued that this sense of uneasiness reflects Baudelaire’s feelings about how the class divide is so significant and how common the situation of him poem is; an affluent man passing through a poor part of town and, rather than feeling desperate to help the people he encounters, thinks only of himself and his own safety and well being.

The rhyme scheme again appears to be regular and predictable, arguably mirroring the predictable and unavoidable problem of poverty. The rhyme changes, however, at line 21 where it loses it precision and slips into half-rhyme and para-rhyme. This seems to reflect the speaker’s weariness and tiredness; he has spent too long in this area and only wishes to be home, he’s seen too much poverty and depravity that he has almost become desensitized to it and so it has lost it’s sharpness.

What is the most important formal feature of this poem, I believe, is the use of the dash in line 34: ‘the hospital fills with their sighs. – Many a one’. It is interesting to note that the dash is immediately preceded by a full stop which actually negates the grammatical need for a dash, implying that it is there for a reason different from grammatical correctness. Instead, the dash seems to signify a change in place and time; the speaker is now at home (perhaps has been for a long time) and is reflecting on what he has seen. This stands out even more because it makes the change back to full rhyme, distinguishing it further from the rest of the poem. The dash separates this final quatrain from the bulk of the poem to highlight that, just as the final couplet in a Shakespearean sonnet concludes the problems arisen earlier in the poem, this is the main message Baudelaire wants to drive home.

A Further Exploration Of The Plight Of The Poor In ‘Evening Twilight’

In my previous post, I showed that there was two ways of reading ‘Evening Twilight’. As the first (the view sympathetic to the wealthy speaker who does not belong to this area, that the criminals are evil and depraved) is fairly self explanatory, I want to focus a bit more on seeing how Baudelaire sympathizes with the poor.

We have previously stated that the upper class was overindulgent and selfish. One of the overindulgence’s of many affluent men would have been visiting brothels and the depiction of prostitution in ‘Evening Twilight’ is very thought provoking; Baudelaire begins the section by stating that ‘among the wind-tormented gas lights/ prostitution switches on’. The clear implication here is that while there is a demand for it, prostitution will be as predictable and as regular as the switching on of the ‘gas lights’. What is interesting here is that the positive connotations of light – safety, purity, goodness – are set against the negative that is prostitution – abuse and exploitation, impurity and despair. This distortion of expectations signals that all is not as it first appears, encouraging the reader to re-read the poem; while a first reading presents the view that this scene is nothing to do with the speaker, who is clearly uncomfortable and does not belong to this area of debauchery and depravity, it is with re-reading the poem that the ideas surrounding the plight of the poor and the ignorance and blame of the rich are discovered.

The tone of the poem when discussing the prostitution can be read as ironic in that it applies all of the blame onto the woman; ‘prostitution switches on, opening her passageways’ clearly defines the abstract noun ‘prostitution’ as feminine despite the fact that the majority of prostitutes are in fact owned and controlled by a pimp. Baudelaire also states that ‘like an enemy planning a coup, she’s there’. The nouns ‘enemy’ and ‘coup’ are definitively negative but they also imply some intelligence and planning, implying that all prostitutes are smart, forward thinking individuals who planned to lead such a life, that they work the way they do out of their own choosing. The ironic tone, then, is clear due to how inconceivably wrong these statements are; this is in fact, Baudelaire is saying, the bigoted belief of some of the men who would use the services of such women, the men who would use her and think that by paying, he is somehow helping her out of her situation.

The speaker continues his description of prostitution by stating that it is ‘burrowing into the wombs of the city’s mires/ like a worm, stealing from Man what it desires’. The use of the word ‘womb’ implies procreation, stating that prostitution will always be there, it reproduces itself; because the social situation will not change, there will always be men with more money than they need who will be willing to pay for sex and there will always be women with far less money than they need who will be desperate enough to charge for sex. This idea is reasserted by the ambiguity of ‘stealing from Man what it desires’; it is not made clear whether the ‘it’ is prostitution (the woman could feel that sex was in fact worthless and meaningless after being abused for so long and so could equate taking money from men for sex as stealing, perhaps as a coping mechanism) or the men (who could have so much money that they are no longer aware of it’s true value and so feel that throwing a few coins at a prostitute was nothing and therefore that they were, in effect, stealing the woman’s purity, perhaps as a means to reaffirm his own power). This idea that prostitution is inescapable is also reaffirmed by the word ‘mires’; while it does mean, and does refer to, poor, dank and dirty areas within the city, mire can also mean a trap, becoming stuck – in other words, not being able to break the cycle of prostitution.

Of course, it is not just prostitutes that make up the city’s underworld; ‘thieves who show no respite or mercy will soon be setting to work’ as well. What is interesting is that they go about their work ‘tenderly’; while this could of course signify the need to be gentle and quiet as they apply their skills of lock- and safe-picking it takes on a new meaning when, further on, the speaker adds that they do so ‘to live, clothe their girls, for a few more days.’ This idea of tenderness changes the meaning of ‘their girls’ from a harem of prostitutes that they need to clothe attractively to earn a living, into something much deeper and more meaningful; ‘their girls’ could in fact be speaking about their wives and daughters. It is this, becoming aware of the other side of the story, that Baudelaire seems to be challenging him reader to do because many people will instantly dismiss a thief as a petty criminal who deserves jail and, ultimately, Hell. Now, however, the are forced to accept that these men, like themselves, have families to care for and provide for which adds a much sharper meaning to ‘to live … for a few more days’ – which man, if his family were starving and freezing, would not resort to stealing to save them?

The next couplet reaffirms the fact the main idea behind the poem, that far too many of the upper class, the people who could do something about such poverty, would rather turn a blind eye: ‘Collect yourself, my soul, at this grave hour/ and close your ears to the rising howl’. While this could be read sympathizing with the scared and out of place speaker who would much rather get out of this area safely, it could be argued that there is a mockery behind the lines – ‘grave’ could be read as dire and dangerous but also much more literally in so far as the fact that many of these poor people will die soon for lack of food, shelter or medicine. The fact that the speaker almost talks to himself as though to someone else also implies a disdain and a disassociation; Baudelaire wants the rich to take a step back from themselves and look at how they treat others. ‘Close your ears to the rising howl’, while first read as a savage and predatory ‘howl’, like that of the ‘wolf’ spoken of at the start of the poem, it also takes on another meaning, the idea of a ‘howl’ of pain. Where it to be read this way, it is hard to understand why you would instruct yourself to close your ears to such a noise as opposed to trying to help.

While it is easy to see how the examples I have used could be read sympathetically to the scared rich speaker, the fact that the two meanings can work together is also a message from Baudelaire; two seemingly opposites can in fact work together harmoniously in order to achieve something. Therefore, the upper- and criminal classes can work together in order to bring about the end of such poverty.

Ambiguity And Social Commentary Within ‘Evening Twilight’

‘Evening Twilight’ can be read in two different but simultaneous ways and so can be called ambiguous. The first stance that the speaker could be taken is that he is scared and uncomfortable walking through such a rough area and simply longs to be home, away from the debauchery of the streets after dark. On the other hand, the poem could be read as a sympathetic reflection on the plight of the poor. This ambiguity is very carefully crafted because while the first reading sympathizes with the upper classes as the speaker is one of them and simply wishes to be away from the filth and depravity of the working classes, the second reading criticizes this exact idea and challenges the implied reader to do something about the problem. Note that I am assuming that the implied readers are the people of the upper classes because only the wealthy would have been able to afford education in the mid-19th century and thus would have been the only people likely to be reading poetry.

Baudelaire states that at the fall of evening ‘restless man becomes a savage creature’. This can be read as the speaker talking about ‘the criminals’ who are restless for the darkness to fall in order to allow them to perform their crimes without being caught. These men are ‘savage creatures’ who are predatory, primal; they are driven by the primary instincts of eros and thantos, the desires for sex and aggression, and will prey on the innocent in order to receive gratification. However, a second way to read this is to apply it to the rich men who use the services offered on the streets after dark; driven by their own instinctual drive for sex they frequent the brothels. Another way to look at it, however, challenges the rich who simply see the poverty on the streets and keep on walking ‘restlessly’ – they are ‘savage’ in their disinterest.

The second sentence in the poem shows the similarities between the upper classes and the criminals they abhor; ‘evening [is] desired by him who can say/ without his arms proving him a liar: “Today/ we’ve worked”‘ and this clearly does not include the rich men whose work would not involve their ‘arms’ (bankers, for example, are not exactly required to do much heavy lifting), nor does it include the criminals who would not work during the day. Baudelaire confirms who is meant when he explains that ‘it refreshes, this evening hour/ those spirits that savage miseries devour/ the dedicated scholar with heavy head/ the bowed workman stumbling home to bed’. Therefore, the fact that neither the criminal underground nor the upper echelons of society can state that they have ‘worked’ shows that neither is actually superior to the other. In fact, the adjectives used to describe those who actually do work and contribute to society – ‘heavy’ and ‘bowed’ – implies that the upper classes exploit the working class to the point that they can do no more with their lives but work and then ‘stumble home to bed’; while the criminal class prey on the rich, the rich prey on the working class. If the rich were to act against the rise of poverty, the situation for all classes would improve dramatically; the criminal class would not have to resort to such measures to survive and would be able to find employment, resulting in the current working class not having to take so much strain and the rich would not fall victim to crime. By not acting for the benefit of others, they are responsible for the criminal class they detest so much.

When Baudelaire mentions that at the fall of evening ‘unhealthy demons rise again/ clumsily, in the air, like busy men’ it can again be read as a criticism of both the criminals and the rich. While the fall of darkness would indeed conceal any illegal dealings, it would similarly conceal any illicit activities that a wealthy man could indulge in. The phrase ‘unhealthy demons’ could apply to either group, dependent on the viewpoint taken; the overindulgence of the rich could be said to make them ‘unhealthy’ in terms of morality, while the criminal class could be thought of as ‘demons’ as the Church condemns thieves, prostitutes, murderers etc. to Hell.

The final quatrain can also be read as ambiguous – ‘Many a one/ will never return to their warm soup by the fire/ by the hearth, at evening, next to their heart’s desire/ And besides the majority have never known/ never having lived, the gentleness of home.’ The ones who ‘never return to their warm soup by the fire’ could be members of the gentry, cruelly murdered as they walked through such areas or it could be the poor criminals who die from a direct result of living in such squalor and poverty: hypothermia, starvation, disease etc. The final couplet can also been seen to apply to either social class – while the poor have never known the gentleness of home as they have never lived in one, it could be seen that the rich, leading such sheltered lives, have never truly lived and so do not appreciate the gentleness of home.

Both readings of this poem are equally applicable, but to chose one over the other would be to ignore half of the message we have discovered. Instead, we should understand that both work well at the same time as each other; the juxtaposition only heightens the meaning that there is a real and serious problem within society by showing how each side, each class, is ignorant of the other.

The Importance Of Tone and Irony – Because Everyone Loves A Sarcastic Poet.

We know that poetry can sometimes pretend to be a speech situation; indeed, when we begin reading a poem, it is best to identify the speaker, the addressee and to figure out what the hell is happening before we dive right into a close reading (if you’re unsure how to do this, have another read of Hearing Voice In Your Head Doesn’t Always Make You Crazy and, for a specific demonstration, The Speaker And Addressee In ‘Still I Rise’). However, some of those speakers can be tricky little devils and don’t actually mean what they say. Before you smack your head on the desk in utter frustration and despair, though, let’s discuss the importance of tone and ways to identify it.

Tone primarily refers to qualities of sound and so is a term not unfamiliar to musicians. When we use the word, however, we are using the derivative of ‘intonation’ which is used specifically to refer to those modulations of voice we use to convey certain emotions or meaning above and beyond those denoted by the actual words we say. Annoyingly, tone can convey meanings which may modify or even contradict the literal meaning of what is said. The question of tone in literature involves working out the general attitude of the text, poetic speaker, narrator or character by making inferences based on the text’s language and genre, and the context in which the words are uttered or the text produced. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics says that ‘the tone of a speaker’s voice … reveals information about her attitudes, beliefs, feelings or intent’. An attitude is always directed towards someone or something and there are four basic directions that attitude can be focused: towards the addressee, towards the subject matter, towards the words being used or towards the speaker him- or herself. Therefore, it is important to work out the tone of a poem in order to fully understand it.

The New Critics claimed that irony was the most mature literary tone; this may be the reason why irony is often used for social or political criticism. The word ‘irony’ itself actually comes from the Greek word ‘eironeia’ which means ‘dissimulation in speech’. The verbal dissimulation we call irony typically takes the form of an understatement (or overstatement) in which the actual or intended meaning is often the opposite of the apparent meaning. Irony can be defined as a figure of speech in which the ironic meaning is the opposite of the literal meaning. However, what is important is that the very disparity between what is said and what is meant has to be recognized or else the irony will be missed.

There are several types of irony, one of which is situational, or structural, irony which is produces when a character or speaker says or does something that we as readers recognize as having an ironic significance of which the character is unaware. Dramatic irony is similar to situational irony and it occurs when the audience or the reader of a play knows more than a character does about the character’s situation.

If it is possible to read between the lines and discern the serious point that the text is making, if that point is stable and not itself subject to irony then such irony is therefore called ‘stable irony‘. ‘Unstable irony‘ occurs when it is not clear what ‘stance’ is being adopted behind the irony; this does not mean, however, that a poem that uses this is not engaged with social or political questions. In fact, the ‘undecidability’ of a poem that uses unstable irony can make the poem seem more, rather than less, engaged with some central, ‘undecidable’ questions.

While unstable irony is frequently found in modern poetry, it derives from something named ‘Romantic irony’ in the Romantic period by the German writer Friedrich Schlegel. Romantic irony can be defined as ‘a mode of dramatic or narrative writing in which the author builds up the illusion of representing reality, only to shatter it by revealing that the author, as artist, is the arbitrary creator and manipulator of the characters and their actions’. Lilian Furst explains that ‘the Romantic ironist … assumes a prominence in his narrative that is the antithesis of the half hidden, reticent position associated with the more traditional ironist .. The Narrator hold the centre of the stage, disposing his characters and arranging his materials before our very eyes so that we see not the finished product but the creative process … In the context of the Romantic vision of the artist, irony is the sign of his total freedom, his right to manipulate, to destroy as well as create.’ Romantic irony has come into its own again as ‘Postmodernism’ or ‘new irony’.

In poetry, the New Critics advocated assessing whether the tone of a poem is ‘complex’ and ‘mature’ or ‘idealistic’ and ‘naive’. This is because the kind of tone exhibited by a poetic speaker because the criteria for judging whether or not a poem was ‘mature’ or ‘immature’. Sentimental or naive poetry attempts to ignore and exclude anything that might compromise it’s stance, and mature poetry would imaginatively include potentially damaging viewpoints and resolve them into a complex unity. It has been argued that naive poetry is vulnerable to external irony – that is, to the ironic responses of readers who are not willing to accept sentimental idealism. Mature poetry, on the other hand, is said to have an ironic tone because it precludes attacks from the outside by already including potentially ironic reflections on itself. This is why the New Critics valued irony as the most mature poetic tone; it allows the speaker to take up a knowing, balances, perhaps non-committal attitude towards not only the addressee or theme but also towards the speaker’s own position.

Charles Baudelaire – Evening Twilight (1857)

Here’s the criminal’s friend, delightful evening:
come like an accomplice, with a wolf’s loping:
slowly the sky’s vast vault hides each feature,
and restless man becomes a savage creature.
Evening, sweet evening, desired by him who can say
without his arms proving him a liar: ‘Today
we’ve worked!’ – It refreshes, this evening hour,
those spirits that savage miseries devour,
the dedicated scholar with heavy head,
the bowed workman stumbling home to bed.
Yet now unhealthy demons rise again
clumsily, in the air, like busy men,
beat against sheds and arches in their flight.
And among the wind-tormented gas-lights
Prostitution switches on through the streets
opening her passageways like an ant-heap:
weaving her secret tunnels everywhere,
like an enemy planning a coup, she’s there
burrowing into the wombs of the city’s mires,
like a worm stealing from Man what it desires.
Here, there, you catch the kitchens’ whistles,
the orchestras’ droning, the theatres’ yells,
low dives where gambling’s all the pleasure,
filling with whores, and crooks, their partners,
and the thieves who show no respite or mercy,
will soon be setting to work, as they tenderly,
they too, toil at forcing safes and doorways,
to live, clothe their girls, for a few more days.
Collect yourself, my soul, at this grave hour,
and close your ears to the rising howl.
It’s now that the pains of the sick increase!
Dark Night clasps them by the throat: they reach
their journey’s end, the common pit’s abandon:
the hospital fills with their sighs. – Many a one,
will never return to their warm soup by the fire,
by the hearth, at evening, next to their heart’s desire.
And besides the majority have never known
never having lived, the gentleness of home!

But What If It’s Just A Beach? A Focused, Close Reading Of ‘Dover Beach’.

Having gone back over ‘Dover Beach’ (I wrote the previous post several days ago and have only just gotten around to publishing it on here), I think it would be stupid to not talk about the imagery presented here. And what is that imagery mainly concerned with? The beach. Obviously. I’ve already suggested that the whole poem is a reflection on the degradation of religion, specifically Christianity, that began at the end of the 19th century but that was based on a very broad reading. I know want to argue this same point, but focused on the specific imagery and poetic language used in the poem (remember the idea of ‘reading in slow motion’ I said the New Critics advocate? No? Go back and read ‘What Is Poetry? A Stupid Question But A Good Place To Start’.)

The poem begins peacefully – ‘The sea is calm tonight, The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits’. Note the use adjectives: ‘calm’, ‘full’ and ‘fair’. They are all positive words and so the poem is not only peaceful but also contented. Interestingly, the scene is constructed with very simple clauses that state the situation; this makes it read as though it were very ordinary and common for the sea to be so calm (see how the additional ‘so’ makes ‘calm’ seem much more unusual). This could signify the religious certainty that Arnold grew up with; it is an assumed and accepted fact of life that is pleasant and, possibly, undervalued.

Suddenly, the light from France disappears, leaving ‘the cliffs of England [to] stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.’ This image is still as peaceful as the start of the poem, and yet it makes ‘the cliffs of England’ lonely all of a sudden; the verb ‘vast’ implies a sense of overwhelming size and yet even in this very large image, England is alone. This light may represent faith overall, it could equally just be the loss of certainty in the Church because this image is still ‘tranquil’; as opposed to a complete collapse of faith, it is just a slight shaking of it. However, while the adjective ‘tranquil’ offsets this idea of loneliness in a first reading, it is lost with the knowledge that soon enough the ‘pebbles draw back … and bring the eternal note of sadness in.’ Line 12 – ‘Begin, and cease, and then again begin’ – demonstrates the never-ending, inevitable cycle of the tides and this idea of inevitability could symbolize Arnold’s reluctant acceptance that he cannot prevent the degradation of religion due to the rise of science.

The second stanza concerns itself, to start with, with Sophocles listening to the sound of the Aegean Sea. Arnold notes that ‘Sophocles heard it’ – what is the ‘it’? Is it the ‘eternal note of sadness’ or is it simply the sound of the tide beginning, ceasing, beginning again? If this were the case, this inevitability, the inability of man to do anything about it, could have been a very depressing conclusion for Sophocles and so Arnold argues that ‘it brought into his mind the turbid ebb and flow of human misery’ which inspired his great tragedies. Arnold could here simply be stating that the act of standing alone (or standing quietly with a lover) by the sea and slowly understanding the true size of man and his inability to do anything of true worth will always result in a sense of depression, whether that person is a 19th century English poet, of an Ancient Greek tragedian. However, this idea could be extended – Arnold is concerned that he cannot do anything of true worth, that he cannot prevent the collapse of the Church.

“The Sea of Faith, Was once, too, at the full”. The word ‘was’ definitively shows that ‘Faith’ is receding; it is no longer ‘full’, as the sea is. The trochaic substitution of ‘too, at’ gives extra emphasis on the ‘too’ which in turn emphasizes the importance Arnold puts on the past – stressing ‘once, too’ implies that this past is where the speaker would rather be. This idea is supported by the assonance in the second half of the stanza – the repeated ‘o’ sound elongated the words, making it sound almost as if the speaker is reluctant to drag himself back to the present. This elongation also forces the reader to pay more attention to the negative adjectives, giving the reader more time to empathize with the speaker.

The imagery presented in the final stanza are in stark contrast with that of the first; it changes dramatically from peaceful and ‘calm’ to ‘a darkling plain, Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.’ This violent imagery supports the assertion that Arnold is speaking about the fate of the Church as it is preceded by a list of positive attributes of a ‘dream world’ which no longer exists but would describe the Christian ideals very aptly. The contrast between the positive, light image of the Christian society and the collapse into anarchy is strong and demonstrates well how the speaker is feeling at the loss of his faith.

So, like I said in my previous post, you have to be able to base your argument on the poem itself. Whilst focusing very specifically on the language and the imagery used throughout the poem, I have strengthened my idea and found new ways to read certain aspects.

What In God’s Name Is Arnold Even Talking About?

We have already concluded that the implied reader of the poem is someone very different to the addressee and that there is an ambiguous underlying message other than a mere description of the view from Dover Beach; were this the case, there would be no need to mention ‘Sophocles’ or ‘The Sea of Faith’.

The speaker seems to be coming to a very difficult and philosophical conclusion and this can be seen by the seemingly haphazard arrangement of the sentence structure which uses both run on lines (enjambment) and end stopped lines; the speaker cannot quite organize his thoughts in a coherent manner. He interrupts himself as he ‘talks’ (don’t forget what we discussed in ‘Hearing Voices In Your Head Doesn’t Always Make You Crazy’, that the effect of ‘hearing’ a poem spoken is one that is deliberately used for a reason) – ‘from the long ling of spray where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land, Listen!’ – which again highlights his incoherence. However, this could also demonstrate a passion that renders him incapable of expressing his thoughts quickly enough; his strength of feeling is so extreme that is is difficult to communicate.

The poem focuses on a description of the view of the sea from Dover Beach which is later name ‘The Sea of Faith’; the idea that the speaker is struggling to express could be his depression over the receding influence of religion and belief in God which began in the early 19th century. The only influence of humanity seen in the occasion of the poem (aside from the speaker and the addressee, whom we assume are alone together) is the instance in which ‘on the French coast the light gleams and is gone’. This light could represent the faith of the religious which, like the light, suddenly and unexpectedly dies; the publication of Charles Darwin’s ‘On The Origin Of Species’ in 1859 shocked the foundations of the Church and the rise of other scientific publications was something from which the Church has never recovered.

Arnold’s mention of Sophocles is an interesting one; he notes that ‘Sophocles long ago heard [‘the eternal note of sadness’] on the Aegean’. Arguing that the poem’s main point is the decline of Christianity, we could see that Sophocles, being an Ancient Greek, would not have been exposed to the faith of Christianity and so this ‘eternal note of sadness’ could be brought on by the decline of, or the non-existence of, the Church. Another possible reason for the use of Sophocles could be that he was a famous tragedian; Arnold could be invoking his name in order to transfer some of that identity onto his own work – he is stating that the decline of Christianity was in itself a tragedy.

If we continue with our argument that ‘Dover Beach’ concerns the decline of Christian morality in Europe, we note that deeply religious Arnold would have been understandably horrified at the decay of his belief system; this can be seen in the melancholic lexical field prevalent throughout the poem – ‘the eternal note of sadness’, ‘the turbid ebb and flow of human misery’ and ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing moan’. It is in the fourth stanza that the depression felt by the speaker is most felt; the stanza begins by exclaiming that the world, which seems like ‘a land of dreams’, in fact has ‘neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain’, those positive aspects advocated by Christianity; adhering to the commandment to ‘love thy neighbor’ would in fact solve all of the problems listed above. The listing that Arnold uses is a long list of six – lists of three are frequently found in English to achieve an emphasis – to almost overwhelm the addressee and reader and drill home his point that there is in fact nothing good in the world. His strict adherence to iambic pentameter keeps the syntax well balanced and clear; this demonstrates a very detached, clinical and logical manner of thinking which implies that he has contemplated the situation for a long time and has reached an inevitable and unarguable conclusion: that should the decline of the Church continue, the world will sink into one ‘swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night’.

This is just one possible reading of the poem and, as I go back to it at a later date, I may find more (in which case, expect another post). However, there are many different ways this poem could be interpreted and if you see it a different way, please share your ideas; I could be talking rubbish compared to what you see in it. What is always important, though, is that the poem leads the interpretation. What first made me think of religion was ‘The Sea of Faith’, which then lead me to see if anything else supported this reading. You can read it any way you like, just make sure you can back your argument up with lots of textual evidence.