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The tone of “Dover Beach” is at once existential and pessimistic. Both aspects emerge clearly through the speaker’s thoughts, which progress inescapably from nature’s tranquility to the world’s brutality. The speaker begins by focusing his gaze outward, at the moonlight on the calm sea. But by the end of the first stanza, his thoughts dive inward, toward his own tortured thoughts about the human condition. Though he begins by meditating on nature, he quickly gets caught up in his own existential crisis. By the poem’s end, the speaker’s existential crisis leads to a truly pessimistic vision in which humanity battles it out in an arena of chaos and disenchantment. In literary analysis, “tone” usually refers to the poet’s attitude toward the themes addressed in the work, not the speaker’s. In the case of “Dover Beach,” however, the critical tradition tends to conflate the poet with his speaker. One reason for this conflation is biographical: Arnold likely drafted the poem while on his honeymoon at Dover Beach. The other reason is ideological: Arnold mourned the waning influence of faith in the nineteenth century. At least at the time of writing, Arnold shared his speaker’s pessimistic vision of a cruel, dispirited future.

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