Scary poems, part two: “Dover Beach”

 

Managed to scoop up another poem. It was more difficult than I thought it would be. My Audible collection of “classic” poems hasn’t been that helpful. It seemed rather like what people might have picked a hundred years ago – or at least before I was born. Yeah … who even reads poems today? At least nobody I know. But – as the conversation that triggered this proved – “we” know a lot more of them than we think. And, contrary to this seeming indifference – not least my own! – as soon as I have sunk my teeth into one, they prove to be really good poison …

 

 

Dover Beach (by Matthew Arnold)

 

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 the distant northern sea.

 

The Sea of Faith

Was once too at the full, and round the 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.

 

 

Every time I read this, I find it more amazing, more … kind of unbelievable – and it generates new, different thoughts, so that I may never come to write something definite about it. But maybe this is not the point at all - which might be to discover other qualities of reader-text relationships that I don’t discover in long prose or drama, or clever and glossy TV series. First of all, that it is just impossible to APPRECIATE a little bit of text like this to the hight of its potential of being appreciated. Or that the main “function” of a poem is to GET ME DOWN to that state where I am able to shut out everything else and WANT to listen to it.

 

And I have now located my central issue with poetry – apart from its not being immediately satisfying or entertaining. The main difference for me approaching it compared to other fictional text: I have to be much more ACTIVE to stay with it LONG ENOUGH to make it work on me. At school or at uni you always have these boxes to tick off – like verse, rhyme, imagery and tropes, historical background and so on. As a means to understand poetry, in my experience, they are mostly counter-productive, but they were useful as a means to tie me to the text long enough for it to unfold its “vortex energy”. Which is something that never ceases to amaze me in great poems.

 

What I noticed, though, already when I read Barrett Browning, is that it would probably be really useful to know the person who has written this a little better – or rather a lot! And this feeling that many readers have about their favourite authors was never a big concern of mine. Now I came to think that it depends as well on the KIND of fictional communication. In my opinion it doesn’t really matter where drama is concerned, or just marginally. That we don’t really know anything about William Shakespeare doesn’t impair our communication with these plays the least bit when we see them on the stage. Obviously – because the author stays completely outside of them, having to put all he has to convey into the hands, mouths and expressive faculties of the characters, respectively: the actors. It's already different with prose – though only gradually. As a rule, the author does well to stay out of it, in my opinion, but there are multiple clandestine or indirect ways of putting oneself into it. I find it interesting that Richard Armitage, trying to find out about the man Chekhov, stated that he had to revert to the short stories for that purpose. I think I found out what I find most interesting about Chekhov seeing and reading the plays: the way he is dealing with his characters. By “allowing” them to be so independent and alive – so various in their respective personal unhappiness - he made a big impression on me AS A FELLOW HUMAN BEING. But there is not that much about the DIFFERENCE we also need to understand. For example about what he was actually thinking about the world he was living in. We find a lot more about this in his prose. Nonetheless it is an INDIRECT contact – struck through conclusions. Where poetry is concerned, there usually is this DIRECT connection being struck with the human being that is speaking in this fictional situation we are getting into ourselves. Maybe my instinct to stay clear of the author is also something that makes poetry difficult for me.

 

Nonetheless I didn’t act on that impulse and googled … I guess I thoroughly distrust the image of a person mirrored by other people And to get it from them direct – even if there are letters and stuff – is rather a hopeless undertaking. And, of course, rather time-consuming. Therefore my communications with poems will have to remain what was called “text immanent” at uni, a way to deal with fiction that we were encouraged to despise. Of course! – every attempt to link to a text directly was discouraged. (Understandably so – these pointless discussions I remember would have become MORE pointless. We were there to learn something, not to share our lack of experience of ourselves and life …) And, at least where poetry is concerned, it’s a bit like “method”. Not a strict parallel, of course, just because of the risk. If you fail, NOTHING will happen. If you are successful, UNEXPECTED things will happen to a degree that might become SCARY. I suppose it’s the reason that, for me, every poem that I can get to cooperate will become a tad scary. Or a lot.

 

I think I hung on to this poem in the first place because of its realism. Because I RECOGNIZED the moment it describes without remembering to actually having lived it myself: looking out on the sea by night and hearing the noise of the pebbles being pushed up on the shore and then drawn back … I could HEAR the noise – which I must have heard myself at some point. And I could hear and feel the waves through the fabric of the verse, though only faintly. (The reading on the recording wasn’t special, I can now read it much better myself, though it turns out DIFFERENT every time I read it. It’s so much alive …) This made me overcome my initial difficulty and find a way to STAY with the text, trying to figure out the “sound scheme” myself, spending hours trying out how it might be written down. It was not really an enjoyable way of dealing with it – and ultimately pointless. I shouldn’t have worried about that because, as I unintentionally found out when I finally googled the text, there is no definite sound scheme. It might actually be the first poem written in free verse – which makes it even more fascinating – this unique point in time! -  because: how does anyone come to INVENT something like this? Though, when all was done, the pointless hours of toiling with it were not in vain. I might have learned it by heart, which again I didn’t, but I think I became even more acquainted with it in THIS way because I really got to the bottom of the fabric and the reality of these words coming into existence kind of being “pulled” through this fabric. There is scant likeliness of them being chosen. (A sonnet, for example, and, of course, any kind of rhyme, makes what is going to get into a poem much more predictable.)

 

So, looking back, it became much more important to me than what “ignorant armies clash by night” might mean how these words came into being through the initial realistic imagery of waves inexorably and endlessly pushing pebbles onto the shore and drawing them back. The process how this eternal moment that erases itself from consciousness every time it happens gets turned into this creative metaphor. And the experience of a poem as this device to fabricate my SOUL – the kind of soul I re-discovered in my last post about Barrett Browning’s sonnet. Of course it EXISTS – in the way text exists, actually and potentially in my brain, but I cannot reach out to it. It doesn’t really belong to me. It is my IMAGINATION that will throw itself out there, into the darkness, and bring in unknown and surprising content and connections, but it needs some kind of efficient tool – like this poem – to do it. And it fascinates me that I am actively creating my soul -  by painstaking and annoying work, not by kind of “dreaming it up”, because this makes it more real. It is the REAL USE something like a poem has – and the actual point of not being so lazy as I have become during this year of lockdowns. Just bothering with the few things I HAVE to take care of – which makes me constantly dissatisfied and angry.  It is not immediately obvious, like running. I cannot believe it has taken me until now to take up running because of the big difference a little running makes to my life. I am a changed person. And poems are kind of like this! Only much harder.

 

That this is indeed a “classic” poem is made evident to me by this certainty that so many people’s souls have found their own way from listening to the noise of the pebbles slashing on the shore towards the “darkling plain” of their own fears about the world surrounding them when the “bright girdle” of received ideas and certainties - ultimately of day-dreaming! - is wearing thin. As it does rather a lot, right now. (I just found out that, for me, the greatest danger of the corona virus might be how it is beginning to mess with my HEAD …) And probably encountered the only remedy that there is against it: GENUINE human contact. In the poem, the anonymous speaker is defined by where he is standing and by the physical presence of a loved person he can call to his side. (“He” in this case because the author is male. Or should be …?) Someone he can rely on. Weirdly enough for me, I am constantly finding out that this isn’t just a bit of comfort. Kind of like children having imaginary friends, reaching out to “people like me” still seems to be what is keeping my soul alive – protected from the virus.