Dover Beach - Matthew Arnold

Dover Beach (1867) - Matthew Arnold

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 he waves draw back, and fling
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cese,a dn then again begin,
With remulous 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 miser; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Wsa 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 nightwind, 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, nore love, nor light.
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darling plain
Swept with confused alalrms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night