[6] Reflecting the traditional notion that the poem was written during Arnold's honeymoon (see composition section), one critic notes that "the speaker might be talking to his bride".
The sea is calm to-night, The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits;—on the French coast, the light Gleams, and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
One sees a difference between Sophocles interpreting the "note of sadness" humanistically, while Arnold, in the industrial nineteenth century, hears in this sound the retreat of religion and faith.
[11] A more recent critic connects the two as artists, Sophocles the tragedian, Arnold the lyric poet, each attempting to transform this note of sadness into "a higher order of experience".
[12] Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
[8][13][14] Having examined the soundscape, Arnold turns to the action of the water wave itself and sees in its retreat a metaphor for the loss of faith in the modern age,[15] once again expressed in an auditory image ("But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar").
[16] The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd; But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear[17] And naked shingles of the world.
Critics have varied in their interpretation of the first two lines; one calls them a "perfunctory gesture ... swallowed up by the poem's powerfully dark picture",[18] while another sees in them "a stand against a world of broken faith".
for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
[8][24][25] "The poem's discourse", Honan tells us, "shifts literally and symbolically from the present, to Sophocles on the Aegean, from Medieval Europe back to the present—and the auditory and visual images are dramatic and mimetic and didactic.
Exploring the dark terror that lies beneath his happiness in love, the speaker resolves to love—and exigencies of history and the nexus between lovers are the poem's real issues.
[33] According to Tinker and Lowry, "a draft of the first twenty-eight lines of the poem" was written in pencil "on the back of a folded sheet of paper containing notes on the career of Empedocles".
[2] William Butler Yeats responds directly to Arnold's pessimism in his four-line poem "The Nineteenth Century and After" (1929): Though the great song return no more There's keen delight in what we have: The rattle of pebbles on the shore Under the receding wave.
In Hecht's poem she "caught the bitter allusion to the sea", imagined "what his whiskers would feel like / On the back of her neck", and felt sad as she looked out across the channel.
[40] Kenneth and Miriam Allott, referring to "The Dover Bitch" as "an irreverent jeu d'esprit", nonetheless see, particularly in the line "a sort of mournful cosmic last resort", an extension of the original poem's main theme.
for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.