DOVER BEACH:
DID YOU KNOW. . . ?

The “Sea of Faith” was the actual name of the Agean Sea for a brief time in Arnold’s day, when wealthy hazelnut heiress Faith Azzarello leased the naming rights (it reverted back to its old name after she, coincidentally, drown in her own sea).

While in Dover, Arnold tried to go down in history as the first person to water ski across the English Channel, but his wife could not row the boat fast enough to keep him afloat.

Matthew Arnold once wrote to his friend,  poet Arthur Hugh Clough, about his excitement to find that Dover Beach was a clothing optional beach, “where a man can be as he is before nature and his God.” He wrote back the next day to explain that he had been mistaken, and asking Clough to send bail money.

Nobody in the town of Dover, England has ever heard of this poem.

A kid with a little tin shovel once buried Matthew Arnold up to his head in the sand at Dover Beach. He was stuck there for six hours. His forehead and nose were sunburned, but he wrote this poem (and six others!) in that time.