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How does the light's symbolism in "Dover Beach" change from lines 3-4 to the final stanza?

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In "Dover Beach," the symbolism of light changes from representing fleeting hope to embodying existential despair. Initially, the light on the French coast in lines 3-4 symbolizes a lost connection and fading hope amid the poet's existential anxiety. By the final stanza, the absence of light reflects a world devoid of joy, love, and certainty, highlighting the darkness and chaos faced without the guiding faith once provided by religion.

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The poem “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold deals with the feelings of existential anxiety brought on by the growing confidence of the enlightenment ideas in Victorian England. Arnold, a Victorian-era poet, would have felt the decreasing stability of religious faith and an increasing insecurity/existential dread at the prospect that humanity is alone and doomed to die without the hope of resurrection or faith.

The disconnect that the poet feels is expressed by the dying of the light in the first stanza of the poem,

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Arnold, in the first stanza, talks about the disconnect he feels in the world—and the light on the French coast represents what connection and hope he used to possess. It fades in the first few lines, and he is left instead with the image of the...

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sea bringing in rocks, and then tossing them violently against each other on the shore. The sea, he explains in the next stanza, represents the ebb and flow of human misery, the sadness at the ups and downs of our lives.

In the third stanza, he ties the misery that humans feel to the withdrawal of Faith from humanity. He says,

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,

The uncertainty and dread caused by the recession of Faith from the world then is related back to the light going out in the first stanza when Arnold says,

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.

In stanza four, we see the conclusion he reaches in the poem. Despite the light in stanza one giving a false idea of hope, the reality people face is not joy, love, light, certainty, peace, or relief from pain but instead it is to be banished into unknowing darkness—being unable to navigate the world effectively without the firm hold that Faith used to give people.

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