The Poetry Professor Season 1, Episode 16

Welcome to The Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt, where every week I read you an original poem and then we talk about its key technique. This season, you’ll hear poems from my book Noctis Terrores.

Today, you’ll hear “Understanding English Poetry”, and we’ll talk about response poems. This one is a response poem to Matthew Arnolds “Dover Beach”, which was first published in 1867. So, let’s hear the original first and then I’ll read you mine.

Here’s “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold:

Dover Beach

The sea is calm tonight.

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.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegean, 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.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! 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.

I first read “Dover Beach” in high school in AP English with the late great Nancy Macurda, to whom this book, Noctis Terrores, is dedicated. Back then, I was stunned by the intellectual concepts, the world rocked by war. Science was upending Christianity, and the Crimean war, the first modern war, was only two years away.

Then later, somewhere in adulthood, I read that Matthew Arnold was on his honeymoon when he wrote this poem, and that floored me. This dude is supposed to be focused on his wife, right? And so eventually I wrote this poem, “Understanding English Poetry”.

Understanding English Poetry

“Ah, love, let us be true

To one another!”

–Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”

Matthew Arnold goes to Dover Beach on his honeymoon.

For decades, dinosaurs have emerged from English cliffs,

bone by grim Darwinian bone. Geologists are mapping

Britain’s soil, two million years of Bible-crushing rock.

A hard time to be a Christian. Maybe they’ve just made love.

The sweat is drying on the bed sheets, and Arnold stands

by the open window, watching white caps lap the shore.

He thinks of sorrow, the loss of Christian faith, how love

is the only thing worth holding. It’s April, critics say, or mid-July.

Tomorrow, honeybees will swim through fields of French lavender,

wave after tiny sighing wave. He doesn’t mean to be depressed.

He finally found a good job. Her father approved the marriage.

But nights have always been hard, and he has these Greek poems

rolling in his head, so Arnold stands by the window, a scrap of paper

in his hand, counting syllables. That’s poetry, you understand?

Her legs are tangled in the bed sheets, one bare thigh white

as the stars that rise and fall in the waves below, and he’s looking

in the wrong direction. He’s looking with all his might.

Discuss:

A response poem is a conversation with the cannon. It’s poets talking to each other across the page. I’m not the first to respond to Arnold’s poem. Anthony Heck did it with the foul titled “The Dover B Word”, and I’m not going to say that word here on the show today.

My poem “Forty is Another Country”, which I’ll read to you in episode 21, also references “Dover Beach”, but that one just has a quote at the end. Arnold’s poem doesn’t shape that entire poem the way it does here.

“Understanding English Poetry” couldn’t exist without “Dover Beach”. So what sparks a response poem and what does it need to contain? I mentioned my fascination with the unexpected setting for the writing of this poem. So maybe that’s the first thing: it needs to respond in some way to the idea or the writer, whatever it is that jumps out at you about this poem.

Wrestling with Arnold’s life required me to research quite a few things, so: his biography, our best guesses about when his honeymoon was, the development of evolutionary theory and geology and paleontology in the U.K., the geography of Dover Beach, and even what time of year lavender is probably blooming across the channel in France.

Now, some of that research happened deliberately on purpose as I was writing this poem, and some of it just happened accidentally as a guy who carries home 30 books at a time from the library. In between the high school reading of it and my writing of this poem, you know, I read some books on the subjects. Some of it was deliberate.

There’s a second component I want to talk about, and that’s where the poem intersects my own life. This one allows me to work through my own relationship with poetry. Like, have I been looking at all the wrong things my whole life? Why are nights so hard for me, and is poetry really helping either of us if we can’t even pull off something as basic as a honeymoon?

So there needs to be a connection or conversation with the original poem, but also our own reason that’s driving us to write this companion poem to continue the conversation.

Here’s “Understanding English Poetry” one more time, with a shoutout for the awesome people at Whimsical Poet, where this poem first appeared.