'The eternal note of sadness'

 From time to time I recall some text that my class 'did' during our schooldays and either marvel at our literary capacity, or wonder what our teachers thought they were doing, or both. I was reminded of one such today – Matthew Arnold's 'Sohrab and Rustum', a Homeric narrative poem in 892 lines recounting an episode from Ferdowsi's Persian epic Shahnameh. It's a dramatic story, in which Sohrab unknowingly slays his long-lost son Rustum, but I remember it being heavy going indeed. What reminded me of Arnold today was Patrick Kurp's post, 'So Various, So Beautiful, So New', which takes its title from a phrase in Arnold's famous 'Dover Beach' (quoted by Theodore Dalrymple in an essay quoted by Patrick). This sent me back to 'Dover Beach', which I hadn't read in a while, and which now seems to me even bleaker than ever –

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 Ægean, 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.

And to think he wrote it on his honeymoon... 
(By the way, as has been pointed out many times, Sophocles would not have heard 'the turbid ebb and flow' of the Aegean, as that sea is not tidal.)
   'Dover Beach' has been set to music more than once – most improbably by the Fugs, who perform their, ah, distinctive version of it on the album Tenderness Junction. I'll spare you that, and offer instead the beautiful setting by Samuel Barber, here sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (in a rare foray into English) with the Juilliard Quartet – 

And 'Dover Beach', with its deep melancholy and oceanic imagery, brought to mind the equally bleak closing image of George Meredith's great sonnet sequence, Modern Love –

'In tragic hints here see what evermore
Moves dark as yonder midnight's ocean force,
Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,
To throw that faint thin line upon the shore!'

That one we didn't do at school.