Dear Elizabeth,
Thank you for your letter and for asking me to choose a poem for your collection. My choice is “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold. My explanation for this choice is that it was the first poem I read in English (my fourth language) with any degree of understanding, and it was the subject of one of my first papers for an English literature class. I’ve reread it many times since with increasing pleasure. Also Matthew Arnold was a great figure at Balliol College, Oxford, where I was an undergraduate, and I belonged to a society named after him.
Next time we are in the elevator together, please do introduce yourself.
With warm good wishes,
Yours sincerely,
P.S. We are just leaving for Maine for the summer, so I don’t have a copy of the poem to hand, but I’m sure you can find it in any number of anthologies.
DOVER BEACH
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; — on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! You hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for 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,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
— Matthew Arnold
