Dover Beach

Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.

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-blanch’d 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.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear[14]

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.

多佛海岸

阿諾德

卞之琳譯

今夜海上是風平浪靜，

潮水正滿，月色皎皎

臨照著海峽;――法國海岸上，光明

一現而不見了;英國的懸崖，

閃亮而開闊，挺立在寧謐的海灣里。

到窗口來吧，夜里的空氣多好!

只是，從海水同月光所漂白的陸地

兩相銜結的地方，浪花鋪成長長的一排，

聽啊!你聽得見聒耳的咆哮，

是水浪把石子卷回去，回頭

又拋出，拋到高高的岸上來，

來了，停了，然后又來一陣，

徐緩的旋律抖抖擻擻，

帶來了永恒的哀音。

About the poet:

Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888) was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. Matthew Arnold has been characterized as a sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues.

Notes:

"Dover Beach" is a short lyric poem. Arnold begins with a naturalistic and detailed nightscape of the beach at Dover in which auditory imagery plays a significant role.Arnold hears the sound of the sea as "the eternal note of sadness".Arnold in the industrial nineteenth century hears in this sound the retreat of religion and faith.Having examined the soundscape, Arnold turns to the action of the tide itself and sees in its retreat a metaphor for the loss of faith in the modern age.The poem’s discourse shifts literally and symbolically from the present, to Sophocles on the Aegean, from Medieval Europe back to the present—and the auditory and visual images are dramatic and mimetic and didactic. Exploring the dark terror that lies beneath his happiness in love.