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
This poem can be found within the pages of “Fahrenheit 451,” Guy reads the poem to a group of his wife's friends. The poem is split up into five stanzas, with a line count of eight, six, six, eight, and nine. While the poem follows a loose meter, it can be classified as free verse poetry. There also can be observed a loose rhyming scheme between lines one and three, four and eight etc. Arnold wrote this poem in the 1850s, a time when peoples pillars of faith were slowly being eroded away by scientific proofs such as the ones from Charles Darwin, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck to name a few. Arnold, being a deeply religious man, mourned the slow decline of the faith and it is believed that he wrote “Dover Beach” to express that sense of loss and sadness. The light he references in the last stanza most believe to be religion itself.
I honestly don't know where to start with this book. “Fahrenheit 451” was written and published in 1953, and the reasons for banning, I believe, were understandable when Bradbury wrote it. That year in history Stalin would die, Eisenhower was president of the United States, and the second red scare was in full effect. Although “Fahrenheit 451” never directly mentions communism, the futuristic world it is set in is highly disturbing and, when it was published, could have been seen as a communistic society. However in todays literary book world, I see no reason why this novel should be banned; although truth be told- this was not my favorite. Something about “Fahrenheit 451” just didn't click. That is not to say that the book was not written beautifully, at parts it poetic. Even though “Fahrenheit 451” was not my cup of tea, everyone should read it at least once, if only for the lyrical qualities of Bradbury's “Fahrenheit 451.”
A thought for the evening:
It takes two to tango, but books are not the best dance partners.
- BookBender
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