Previous Next

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Silence versus Noise

The poem’s opening stanza features a tension between silence and noise, which offers the first indication of the speaker’s emotionally turbulent inner life. The first lines the speaker utters emphasize the silent tranquility of the nighttime seascape. Although the speaker focuses on the visual impact of this seascape, omitting specific references to sound, he does use language that communicates quietness through its lulling cadences. “The sea is calm tonight,” he says in his appropriately serene opening line. Similarly calming is the vision of the moonlight as it “Gleams” (line 4) on the water, and the reflection of the sea cliffs as they “stand, / Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay” (lines 4–5). Here, the external quiet mirrors the speaker’s internal quietude. However, sound begins to crash into image as waves begin to crash onto the beach. The speaker calls attention to a noisy interruption: “Listen! you hear the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling” (lines 9–10). At the sound of this “grating roar,” the speaker’s agitated mind dredges up previously settled worries and anxieties. Just as noise easily destroys silence, so does the speaker’s loud thoughts disturb his inner peace.

Light versus Darkness

Over the course of the poem, the speaker draws out a powerful opposition between light and darkness. The poem opens at night, but the night doesn’t initially seem that dark. Instead, the seawater gleams and glimmers as it reflects the light of the moon, hovering far above. The moonlight allows the speaker to see the beach clearly from his window. In fact, as he suggests in lines 3–4, it’s bright enough to illuminate the water all the way across the English Channel to Calais: “on the French coast the light / Gleams.” As the first stanza continues, the speaker’s attention shifts from the sight of the beach to the sound of the waves. His mind then turns away from Dover Beach entirely. Though the speaker’s attention never returns to his physical environment, he ends the poem with a meditation on darkness that at least implicitly references his opening references to light. In line 35, the speaker tells his beloved that they “are here as on a darkling plain,” indicating that they inhabit a twilit world that is fast plummeting into a figurative darkness. By poem’s end, it’s clear just how thoroughly immersed in shadow the speaker’s thoughts have become.

Appearance versus Reality

The poem’s final stanza develops a tension between the way the world appears versus what it’s really like. Addressing his beloved, the speaker says that the world “seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new” (lines 30–32). By seeming to inspire wonder and hope, it’s as if the world promises satisfaction to anyone desiring to lead a meaningful life. But any promises the world may appear to make ultimately prove illusory. As the speaker goes on to clarify, this world that seems so full of possibility, “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain” (lines 33–34). In other words, the world is actually an amoral and uncaring place that leaves its inhabitants to fend for themselves. It’s worth noting that the speaker draws attention to the opposition between appearance and reality through the use of a parallel listing technique. Whereas the world seems “So various, so beautiful, so new,” it really has “neither joy, nor love, nor light.” The fact that the speaker goes on to list another three strikes against the world clearly demonstrates his overriding pessimism.

Previous section Themes Next section Symbols

Take a Study Break