ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -The tone of “Dover Beach” is at once existential and pessimistic. Both aspects emerge clearly through the speaker’s thoughts, which progress inescapably from nature’s tranquility to the world’s brutality.

Detailed explanation-2: -In the poem Dover Beach this same contemporary Victorian pessimism has been portrait. Arnold considered as the loss of faith among the common human beings of England. He describes the situation in a most negative and pessimistic way.

Detailed explanation-3: -"Dover Beach” is a melancholic poem. Matthew Arnold uses the means of ‘pathetic fallacy’, when he attributes or rather projects the human feeling of sadness onto an inanimate object like the sea. At the same time he creates a feeling of ‘pathos’.

Detailed explanation-4: -Matthew Arnold’s 1867 lyric poem ‘’Dover Beach” predominately imparts a mood of somber, reflective melancholy. This mood is conveyed through Arnold’s use of diction.

Detailed explanation-5: -The predominant mood of despair and gloom pervades throughout the poem. Although the poem Dover Beach Poem begins with an enthralling image of the tranquil sea, Arnold doesn’t fail to observe and evoke the “eternal note of sadness” in human life caused by the waning faith in God and religion.