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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.
The situation and setting of Dover Beach are concrete and specific. It is night by the seashore, and the speaker is gazing at the view from a room with someone he invites to “come to the window” (line 6) and “listen” (line 9); later he says to this person, “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!” (lines 29– 30). Most readers have assumed that the speaker and his companion are about to travel from Dover across the sea to France and that the situation is a honeymoon, or at least that the couple is young and married; after all the “world [. . .] seems / To lie before us [. . .] / so new” (lines 30– 32). Although this poem is not a prayer, it is a kind of plea for hope despite the modern loss of faith. The tide is now full, but the poet hears a destructive repetition of rising and falling waves (the pebbles will be worn down eventually), and he dwells on the “withdrawing” side of this pattern. For centuries, Christian belief, “the Sea of Faith” (line 21), was at high tide, but now the speaker can only “hear” it “[r]etreating” (lines 24, 26). On the one hand, then, the specifics of setting— the fact that it is night, that the speaker looks out on a stony beach lined with cliffs, and so on— seem to evoke the sense of danger, isolation, and uncertainty the speaker feels as a result of the loss of faith. On the other hand, however, might details of setting introduce hope into the poem, especially when we combine them with our knowledge of how tides ebb and flow and how the dark of night gives way to the light of morning? (447)
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