Aside from the fact that he is a man looking out a window at the English Channel at night, we have very little concrete knowledge about the speaker. We don’t know his age or profession. We don’t know why he’s at Dover Beach. We do know he’s with his beloved, but we don’t know if she’s his mistress or his wife. Although we have very little information about the man, his increasingly melancholic thoughts allow us to infer that the speaker is in a deeply pensive mood. Indeed, it becomes clear through the progression of his thoughts that the speaker is undergoing a crisis of faith. On the one hand, this crisis of faith is literal. That is, the speaker is experiencing a crisis in his own spirituality as the social and moral influence of religion—what he calls “The Sea of Faith” (line 21)—has begun to wane. On the other hand, the speaker’s crisis of faith is figurative. That is, he’s increasingly unable to believe that human life has any kind of coherence or meaning. This twofold crisis plays out in counterpoint to the external sights and sounds of the nighttime seascape.

As someone experiencing a crisis of faith, the speaker’s feelings about life and the world are marked by a deep ambivalence. This means that his thoughts are characterized by uncertainty and even contradiction. We can detect the speaker’s ambivalence in the poem’s opening stanza. In his first lines, the speaker seems intent on describing the naturalistic features of Dover Beach at night. He conjures the soothing image of “calm” waters with moonlight “glimmering” silently on the “tranquil” bay (lines 1–5). But within this apparent peacefulness, the speaker begins to discern a disturbing sound he didn’t hear at first. As he listens to the sound of waves dragging pebbles along the beach, the noise grows in his mind into a “grating roar” and turns his thoughts toward the sadness and misery of the human condition. The strong contrast between tranquil silence and cacophonous noise in his depiction of the nighttime seascape neatly encapsulates the speaker’s ambivalent state of mind.

Take a Study Break