DOVER BEACH:
SO WHAT?

“Dover Beach” is a poem about a place, for those who didn’t make it through both words of the title. It is on the coast of England, about 22 miles from France, across the English Channel. You can see Calais, France from there, if that’s what you want to do, the way certain politicians can see the Kremlin from their front porch in Alaska. In this poem, Matthew Arnold describes the hell out of the place and makes everyone feel sad while he’s doing it, which is fine. He’s not trying to be cheery.
Perhaps you have never heard of Matthew Arnold. More likely, the name sounds vaguely familiar, and on a quiz you would have circled “Bendover at the Beach” as a poem he wrote, which, though incorrect, would have made him the most excellent hip-hop/surf fusion artist of all time, if not the only one.
First thing’s first: what’s with the name? Though he died a long time ago—to be more specific, “back in the day”—Matthew Arnold has one of those “two first name” ensembles show business people used to adopt to hide the fact that they were Jewish (“But of course I can lunch at this country club!”) or German (“Adolph who? the name sound vaguely familiar. . .”). A name like that starts Mr. Poetical immediately wondering what it was changed from: Meyer Aronofsky? Moishe Alexanderplatz? Schmuel  Aschenheim?
Turns out, he’s from a family of famous Arnolds. His father, Thomas, was an influential educator in the 1800s, back when education was easy because they had so much less to study. His brother was actually named Thomas also, but went by the name Tom Arnold—though he was famous in education too, he suffers today from being mixed up with the Tom Arnold who nearly won the  Prix d'interprétation masculineat at Cannes for his performances in The Stupids and McHale’s Navy (the movie).  (Not the opera).
Living in the shadow of a famous father and brother would alone have been enough to sink Matthew Arnold, but also, he was number three in the list of Great Poets of the Victorian Era, and he knew it. The Victorian Era was the time when big, armchair-like Queen Victoria ruled Britain, from 1837 to 1901. That’s quite a long time to be queen. It’s really a long time to be anything, including water, dirt, or even cigarette butts. And speaking of things that wouldn’t leave, the number one Victorian poet was Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who was England’s Poet Laureate (government-paid poet: as if poets needed any reason to just sit around taking space in coffee shops) for 42 years. Number two was Robert Browning, the handsome leading man type. So dashing heartthrob and state-sponsored mega-mind pretty much covered all of anybody’s poetry needs, and Matthew Arnold’s bronze medal didn’t exactly win him any free desserts.
Oh, and one more problem for him: most of his poems stunk. “Dover Beach” didn’t, however.
There are two things, maybe three, that make this decent poetry.
The best thing about it is that Matthew Arnold really describes the hell out of that beach. You’ve got your moon and your cliffs, of course, which we all know are white because there was a song about them. You’ve got the sweet smell of the night air. And that sound—Listen!—that waves make when they suck out of the beach pebbles when they are pulling back into the sea that just splashed them up.
The second best thing is that it reads quite naturally. The stanzas are all different lengths, which helps to avoid that tedious “look, it’s a poem” feeling, and, though it has lines that end with rhyming words, they are scattered around in no strict pattern, so you hardly notice them. The net effect is that you don’t read this poem stopping at the end of each line.
Another way Arnold gives readers their freedom to read this as of it is normal language, not poetry, is enjambment.  You would think that with “jam” in the middle, enjambment would have to do with things being jammed together (or with strawberry preserves, or with getting your garage band together to make noise), but it’s actually the opposite. Enjambment is when lines of poetry go commando, without the constraint of punctuation at the end of each line, like a bare-assed Scottsman in a kilt. Maybe that’s how your garage band does jam, after all. When the poem says something like “on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone,” you don’t feel like you have to stop dead at “light,” like an emphysemic taking a cigarette break, and you don’t have to look around for what it rhymes with.
So, what’s all this used for? To depress you, primarily. The waves sound like they’re fighting the beach, and thousands of years ago Sophocles, the Greek playwright, heard the same waves and thought of fighting, too, so nothing has changed and nothing has improved and the world is just as terrible as it ever was, and will be. Why Sophocles? Random choice, probably. If you’d said Matthew Arnold is an example of the way things were back in the day, Matthew Arnold would say that Sophocles is an example of how things were way, way back in the eon. Poets like to compare their morose observations to things said by people long before them—it’s their way of saying, “See, I’m not nuts.”
Sometimes it seems like the whole point of writing poetry is to bitch about what a lousy craphole this world is. If you’re going to get anyone listen to your complaints, though, you’d better be interesting. You better start out with how everything is beautiful before getting into how that beauty is just a mask for a place that has “really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” At least “Dover Beach” isn’t whiny, let’s give it that: there is a big difference between “Woe is me” and “Well, whaddya gonna do?”  Maybe it is the fact that he took such a straight on look at this aura of misery that accounts for why Matthew Arnold isn’t a better known poet today. He probably would have gotten further in the game if he’d made a bigger deal about the poeminess of his poem.