Previous Next

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Misery of the Human Condition

As the speaker’s thoughts turn away from the serenity of Dover Beach at high tide, his mind grows increasingly tormented by thoughts of the misery of the human condition. The speaker’s thoughts begin moving in this melancholy direction at the end of the first stanza, when he likens the periodic sound of crashing waves to a “tremulous cadence” (line 13) that contains an “eternal note of sadness” (line 14). The moment the speaker has this thought, he makes a connection to an ancient Greek tragedian who explicitly compared the sound of waves to the human condition in lines 15–18:

     Sophocles long ago
     Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
     Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
     Of human misery.

The speaker affirms Sophocles’s pessimism in the poem’s final stanza. There, he provides a disturbing vision of a joyless and loveless world that offers humans “[neither] certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain” (line 34). This world, he contends, is like a twilit plain where “ignorant armies” (line 37) clash chaotically in the falling darkness. Although the speaker is offering a vision of what the world is like, his real emphasis falls on those metaphorical armies. The speaker seems to imply that we are all like soldiers fighting on a bewildering battlefield, struggling and afraid. Such is the misery of the human condition.

The Waning Influence of Christian Faith

A key theme in “Dover Beach” relates to the waning influence of Christianity. This theme makes its most obvious appearance in the third stanza, when the speaker invokes a metaphorical “Sea of Faith.” This “sea” used to be full sometime in the recent past, but its reserves have diminished in the intervening years. Symbolically, the speaker uses the Sea of Faith to draw a link between the literal ebbing of the tide at Dover Beach and the figurative ebbing of religion’s tide in nineteenth-century Britain. On a personal level, the speaker clearly derives an important aspect of his identity from his devotion to the Christian faith. However, the speaker’s concern with the religion’s diminishing influence isn’t merely personal. Although religion provides the individual with a personal grounding in faith, it also offers a moral framework that can help hold society together. Without a shared morality to guide the wider community’s sense of what matters most in the world, society easily falls apart. It is precisely this concern with impending social chaos that the speaker projects in his final image of the world as “a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight” (lines 35–36).

The Uncertainty of Love

The poem’s final stanza suggests that one of the concerns preoccupying the speaker relates to the future of his relationship with his beloved. He first calls out to his beloved in lines 9–14, when he draws her attention to the “grating roar” of the waves as they fling pebbles up and down the beach. The speaker addresses his beloved a second time in the poem’s final stanza, where he asks her to make a promise: “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!” (lines 29–30). Here, the speaker begs his beloved to pledge her fidelity. This request directly precedes his analysis of the world as an arena of chaos. Effectively, the speaker is asking his beloved to promise her love and faith in an otherwise loveless and faithless world. This marks an ambivalent moment in the poem, for it’s unclear how earnestly the speaker believes in the power of love. Perhaps the speaker really thinks that, through their love, the couple may stand against the tide of chaos. On the other hand, his desire for his beloved’s promise of faith could simply be a conventional gesture of romantic love that provides little more than empty comfort.

Previous section Setting Next section Motifs

Take a Study Break