Essay on Technical Qualities, Symbolism, and Imagery of Dover Beach

Technical Qualities, Symbolism, and Imagery of capital of Delaware bound In Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold creates a dramatic monologue of the Victorian Era that shows how perceptions can be misleading. Arnold conveys the theme of Dover Beach through three essential developments the good qualities of the verse itself, symbol, and imagery. The theme of illusion versus reality in Dover Beach reflects the speakers awareness of the incompatibility between what is perceived and what truly is real. The technical qualities of the poem acknowledge rhythm and meter, rhyme, figures of speech, sound, and irony of the wrangle. The mechanics al iodin do non explain why illusion and reality differ, hardly they do inspection and repair to explain how Arnold sets up the poem to support the theme. The most prominent mechanisms include the rhythm and the meter of the lines and the stanzas of the poem. Line 1 is an iambic trimeter The sea/is silence/to-night. The gentle pulsating rhythm o f the iamb mirrors the ebb and flow of the sea. The actual words of the first line manifest this idea to picture a composure sea gently lapping at the beach. The second line, an iambic tetramater, also reveals a calm sea. However, line 3 chequers the pattern and forces the reader to break his or her own rhythm. Line 3 includes Upon/the straits,//on the French/ sliding board/the light. The line begins and ends with an iamb, but the middle is broken up with an anapest. The anapest is a foreshadow of the tumult to come. The fourth line breaks up even further with an anapest at the beginning, but the fifth line recovers the rhythm. Glimmering/and long//out in/the tran/quil bay. The rhythm recovers by the end of the first stanza, but the original trimeter has not. The number of feet per lin... ...he speaker is supported by the rhythm and the meter, the neglect of a consistent rhyme scheme, the figures of speech, the sound of the words, and the irony of the entire poem. The symbolis m of the sea and the imagery of light and dark bring out the alternate(a) visual and auditory qualities, which elaborate on illusion and reality, respectively, Arnolds portrayal of one persons battle with illusion and reality shows a complex view of benevolence in a simple poem. Works Cited Arnold, Matthew. Dover Beach. 1867 Literature. 5th ed. Eds. throng H. Pickering and Jeffery D. Hoeper. Upper Saddle River, NJ Prentice, 1997. 952-53. Ciardi, John. How Does A Poem Mean? capital of Massachusetts Houghton, 1975. 196. Untermeyer, Louis. The Pursuit of Poetry. New York Simon & Schuster, 1969. 57-59. Walcutt, Charles Child. The Explicator. Chicago Quadrangle, 1968. 16-9.