ter, views the poem as reflecting the same attitude displayed by Arnold in "Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse," a poem written on his honeymoon trip. In that poem Arnold, moved to "pits of cultural despair" during his visit to the overwhelming French monastery, saw no hope in the present and was not at all sure about the future (Hamilton 144). In the "Stanzas" he speculates that "Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age / More fortunate, alas! than we" and he asks posterity to simply "leave our desert to it peace" (quoted in Hamilton 144).
This despairing attitude about the desert of European culture seems an unlikely theme for a poem written on or about his honeymoon. But, as Trilling and Bloom note, if it was written earlier it may reflect the poet's "anguish about Marguerite," the mysterious French woman from whom he had to part (593). Even dating the poem a few years later, however, does not rule out a trace of his regret over Marguerite, and the barrier that exists between France and England in the first stanza of "Dover Beach" may refer to that particular loss. In the poem, of course, the speaker turns to another and addresses her. They are at Dover, as, on their honeymoon, Arnold and his bride were twice at Dover, and he voices a desire that they commit "to be true / To one another" since the world is such an empty place (29-30). The "confused alarms of struggle and flight", from which the commitment of the two people in the poem will offer some shelter, is a condition that Arnold saw as prevalent in his times. As he said in his Preface of 1853, "the confusion of the present times is great [and] the multitude of voices counselling different things bewildering" (quoted in Armstrong 168).
But the poem may also reflect Arnold's growing sense that poetry had little effect on the state of the world. He had written of the Romantic poets that the world was no different for the expression of their sufferings and that surely...