The Victorian View of Dover BeachAs the narrator of "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold looks out the window, he sees a magnificent world of nature: the sea and the cliffs under the light of the moon. Describing this scene to his lover, he invites her to “come to the window” so that she can see it too (6). But it's not just a beautiful beach that the speaker wants his lover to see. Instead, he wants her to see Dover Beach as an ironic image that represents her entire world. Likewise, Matthew Arnold wants his reader to recognize the speaker and the scene as a portrait of Arnold's world and feelings. What Arnold writes about is not poetic fiction: it is a reflection of the changes he sees in his world due to industrialism, to science. , and a rationalism that opposes traditional religious beliefs. As Arnold uses Dover Beach to represent this changing modern world, he creates a loudspeaker to represent the tension that the poet and his fellow Victorians feel: while living in a modern world, they yearn for the great ages of the past. Like Arnold, the speaker feels isolated from the world around him: he looks out the window and “sighs for palaces lost under the sea” (Dahl 36). Initially, the beach described by Arnold's speaker seems serene, calm, and peaceful. This is the romantic world that the speaker (and Arnold) want to live in. However, for Arnold, the modern world can only be peaceful if the natural order and authority of social institutions can be maintained. Arnold's recognition of the futile illusion of such stability soon overcomes the sense of tranquility with which the poem opens. As the speaker begins to gaze upon the scene and listens to the pebbles crunching with the waves, a "...... middle of paper ......is the apparent pleasure offered by Dover Beach at first. However , the calm and violence of the beach, the pleasure and despair of the speaker, are true to Arnold's Victorian consciousness The speaker wants the world to be a world of peace and tranquility, but he cannot. preventing one from seeing its reality This duality dramatizes the conflicted temperament of the Victorians, what Dover Beach as a place symbolizes for the narrator of the poem "Dover Beach" a poem expresses for Arnold and his Victorian audience. Matthew. “Dover Beach.” 1867. A Pocketful of Poems Ed David Madden, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1996. x.Dahl, Curtis. Rep. in Victorian Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. Austin Wright. New York: Oxford UP, 1961. 32-40.