"the pangs that troubled them remain"? (quoted in Hamilton 144). If "Dover Beach" was written around the time of the couple's honeymoon it might also be expressive of a shock of personal change that affected Arnold deeply. On marrying Frances Wightman Arnold was taking up his inspectorship and was finally "about to take his place in the real world" (Hamilton 144). Thus in Dover Beach he wrote "a deeply felt lament for lost belief [that] gives way to a strained, anxious pledge of faith--or of fidelity: fidelity to what might happen next" (Hamilton 144, 145).
He saw this fidelity as a thin hope after recognizing that faith was withdrawing from the world, that the suffering and confusion of humanity was as old as Sophocles, and that Christianity had, at best, only served as an interlude without achieving its full promise. Thus the poem became a "threnody on the lost myth of Christianity" (Armstrong 173). The "turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery" that the regular rhythms of the sea conjured up for Sophocles over 2,000 years earlier were, at best
...