English 12 Chu
Name: ______________________
Period: ______________________
Date: ______________________
“Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;[1] 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,[2]
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles[3] long ago
Heard it on the Agean,[4] 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[5] 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[6] 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.
Directions:
Read the questions carefully. Respond to each thoroughly, insightfully and correctly in complete sentences. Answers are worth two points each.
1. What is the setting of the first stanza? Who is the speaker, and whom is he addressing?
2. What mood do the first six lines evoke for you? What details in these lines establish that mood?
3. What images in the second half of the first stanza begin to change this mood? What emotions do these images evoke?
4. What does the speaker imagine Sophocles also heard long ago? What did the sound bring to Sophocles’ mind?
5. Explain the figure of speech used to describe faith in lines 21-23. What do you think has happened to the speaker’s faith, according to lines 24-28?
6. What does the speaker urge in the last stanza and why?
1
ELA Content Standard 2.0 (Reading Comprehension)
[1] Straits: Strait of Dover, a body of water separating southeastern England and northwestern France.
[2] Strand: shore
[3] Sophocles: writer of tragedies in ancient Greece
[4] Agean: sea between Greece and Turkey
[5] Girdle: belt
[6] Shingles: here, beaches covered with pebbles