Matthew Arnold

Dover Beach

• the most impt thing, as Charles would say, is that "the sea of faith" is still pretty full in the 1850s: so in a way this isn't so much a genuine poem of religious pessimism as a lyric utterance of the position of religious pessimism (or it is that but it's also an examination of the position)
• first stanza is 14 lines, like a tangled sonnet
• strong caesuras moving around in the line in first stanza a rhythmic effect, then in 33-4 it switches so that pauses are less rhythmic than accumulative/enumerative
• "roar" repeated: of the sea but also embodied, chagrined, and repressed or muffled, like the "ignorant armies clash[ing] by night"
• second stanza: Sophocles and the speaker finding "also in the sound a thought" - empty natural phenomena that the lyric subject fills with a content, dramatizing the struggle of that
• "the moon-blanched land": its light is as alien, it feels like, as the speaker's vision
• "so new": again, as Armstrong 1993, the self-consciousness/anxiety about modernity