Essay on Technical Qualities, Symbolism, and Imagery of Dover Beach

Technical Qualities, Symbolism, and Imagery of Dover Beach In Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold creates a dramatic monologue of the Victorian Era that shows how perceptions can be misleading. Arnold conveys the proposition of Dover Beach through three essential developments the technical qualities of the meter itself, symbolism, and imagery. The theme of illusion versus reality in Dover Beach reflects the speakers sentience of the incompatibility between what is perceived and what truly is real. The technical qualities of the poem embarrass one shot and meter, rhyme, figures of speech, sound, and irony of the words. The mechanics alone do not beg off why illusion and reality differ, but they do help to exempt how Arnold sets up the poem to support the theme. The most prominent mechanisms include the rhythm and the meter of the commercial enterprises and the stanzas of the poem. Line 1 is an iambic trimeter The ocean/is calm/to-night. The winsome pulsating rhythm of the ia mb mirrors the ebb and flow of the sea. The actual words of the commencement exercise line manifest this idea to picture a calm sea gently lapping at the beach. The second line, an iambic tetramater, also reveals a calm sea. However, line 3 breaks the pattern and forces the reader to break his or her own rhythm. Line 3 includes Upon/the straits,//on the French/Coast/the light. The line begins and ends with an iamb, but the middle is broken up with an anapest. The anapest is a forecast of the tumult to come. The fourth line breaks up even farther with an anapest at the beginning, but the fifth line recovers the rhythm. Glimmering/and vast// discover in/the tran/quil bay. The rhythm recovers by the end of the first stanza, but the headmaster trimeter has not. The number of feet per lin... ...he speaker is supported by the rhythm and the meter, the lack of a consistent rhyme scheme, the figures of speech, the sound of the words, and the irony of the entire poem. The symbolism of t he sea and the imagery of light and dark bring out the alternating optic and auditory qualities, which elaborate on illusion and reality, respectively, Arnolds portrayal of one persons encounter with illusion and reality shows a complex view of humanity in a simple poem. Works Cited Arnold, Matthew. Dover Beach. 1867 Literature. 5th ed. Eds. James H. Pickering and Jeffery D. Hoeper. velocity Saddle River, NJ Prentice, 1997. 952-53. Ciardi, John. How Does A Poem Mean? Boston Houghton, 1975. 196. Untermeyer, Louis. The seeking of Poetry. New York Simon & Schuster, 1969. 57-59. Walcutt, Charles Child. The Explicator. Chicago Quadrangle, 1968. 16-9.