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“Dover Beach” consists of four stanzas of unequal length that follow the ebb and flow of the speaker’s thoughts and feelings. This real-time unfolding of the speaker’s experience gives “Dover Beach” the characteristic structure of lyric poetry, which often moves from the external world to internal experience. The opening stanza begins with a naturalistic description of the sea. Halfway through, however, the speaker turns his attention to “grating roar” (line 9) caused by pebbles scraping along the beach. For the speaker, the noise sounds an “eternal note of sadness” (lines 14). This moment of abstraction leads into the second stanza, where the speaker’s mind shifts away from his present environment. In connection to the melancholy noise of the pebbles, the speaker recalls a passage where the Greek tragedian, Sophocles, once likened the sound of waves to “the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery” (lines 17–18). The speaker’s thoughts then turn further inward, toward issues that have exacerbated his own emotional turmoil. In particular, he mourns the receding social influence of religion. It is precisely this mournful state of mind that leads him, finally, to beg his beloved to remain faithful in an otherwise faithless world.

In addition to moving progressively inward, the speaker’s thoughts also trace a nonlinear path between past and present. The poem opens in the present time, with the speaker focused on the details of the nighttime scene at Dover Beach. As he listens to the sound of the waves, his thoughts retreat into the past. First, he thinks about Sophocles, who long ago wrote about the tides as a metaphor for human misery. Next, he thinks about the recent past, when religion had a more complete influence over the world. In the final stanza, the speaker returns to the present, though not to his earlier discussion of Dover Beach. Instead, he discusses a more generalized understanding of his present world as one that seems “like a land of dreams” (line 31), but which is actually “a darkling plain” (line 35). The overall effect of this present–past–present structure is pessimistic. It suggests that the human condition is an enduring reality that has always remained unchanged. Although the speaker doesn’t explicitly address the future, his sense of the continuity of the human misery strongly implies that the future will also resonate with “the eternal note of sadness.”

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