The tide is high, the moonlight is bright,
The Zhao Lin Strait on the French coast
Twilight is gathering, and the cliffs in England are towering into the sky.
A huge and vague figure appeared in the quiet bay.
Come to the window, how sweet the evening breeze is!
But listen! Land bleached by moonlight
Where it meets the sea, there is a long spray line.
There was a harsh voice,
This is when the waves take away pebbles and then turn around.
Throw them on the high beach,
Go up, stop, go up again,
At a slow and trembling pace
Make a sound of eternal sadness.
Sophocles a long time ago
Hearing this voice by the Aegean sea,
What caused human suffering in his mind?
Turbid waves rolling tide;
We listened in the distant North Sea,
I also recognized the meaning in this voice.
Sea of faith
The high tide, like a bright belt,
Around the world coast.
But now all I can hear is
Its sad low tide roared for a long time,
It retreated into the smell of the night wind,
Retreat from the vast and dark borders of the world,
Leaving only a pool of bare pebbles.
Ah, love, can we?
Be sincere to each other! Because even though the world
Show us like a dream country,
So colorful, beautiful and fresh,
In fact, there is no joy, no love and no light.
No affirmation, no peace, no relief of pain;
We are in the dark wilderness,
Struggle and flight constitute confusion and fear,
Ignorant armies clashed with each other in the dark.
(translated by Bai Fei)
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Sensitive minds can usually feel the essence of some times more deeply than their peers. Matthew arnold is an obvious example. While the British Empire was intoxicated with the superficial prosperity of Victoria's "prosperous times", as a poet and scholar, he sang a sad song of despair for the crisis of the whole western civilization in his masterpiece Dover Beach.
In nature, Dover Beach can be regarded as a sentimental work. Start with a description of the scenery and end with an emotional discussion, which is affectionate and meaningful. However, it is different from traditional sentimental poems, but it uses some dramatic techniques and is expressed in the form of the protagonist's monologue. The dramatic scene in the poem is arranged in a house on the beach of Dover on a bright night. Dover is a port where people sail across the English Channel to France.
At the beginning of this poem, it was the ebb and flow of the night tide, the sea was calm and everything seemed so quiet in the moonlight. Isn't it a good time for lovers to meet on such a good night? So the poet couldn't help greeting his lover: "Come to the window, how sweet the evening breeze is!" At this moment, however, there was a "loud noise" from the rubble thrown by the waves at low tide. Its slow, sad and repetitive beat evokes the poet's endless thoughts, and poetry advances step by step with the development of the protagonist's thoughts from scenery description to lyric. The poet first linked the tidal changes in front of him with the fate of mankind, because the endless tides, although rising and falling, never stopped. Isn't this an eternal symbol of human disaster? In order to emphasize this point, the poet skillfully inserted an allusion: Sophocles, an ancient Greek tragedian, made a similar exclamation in the famous play antigone more than two thousand years ago. In the third act of the play, there is such a chorus: "Those days that have never tasted evil are happy. Once a house falls from the sky, the curse will never end, and it will be passed down from generation to generation in this family. When the strong sea breeze swept the waves from the dark sea, the waves rolled up the sand on the seabed, which was a gloomy noise from the land facing the storm. "Therefore, poets are also associated with the issue of human belief. Although people have suffered disasters in the past, the wave of faith is full after all. It protects the suffering creatures with brilliant golden light and endless warmth and gives them comfort. Take Sophocles as an example. Although he lamented the eternal suffering of mankind, he proudly declared: "Many things are wonderful, but the most wonderful thing is people. "Now? Everything has become a thing of the past, and faith has retreated to the bottom like a ebb tide, leaving only a beach of bare pebbles, and nothing can support people to avoid setbacks and suffering. People have become synonymous with suffering, and frustration and illusion have almost become the essential attributes of human existence. The poet used several verbs in succession here: "retreat", "retreat" and "retreat", which highlighted the current situation of the crisis of faith. What can a poet do in the face of such an empty and sad world brought about by the ebb of faith? He turned to his partner in grief and despair. At this moment, she seems to be the only person in the world who can communicate feelings. Since it seems that the world is no longer colorful, beautiful and fresh, and since the world is full of chaos, darkness and ugliness, people can no longer deceive themselves and expect nothing. Two hearts in the same boat love each other and treat each other sincerely, which has become the only support for people to struggle in the disaster.
The Victorian era in which Arnold lived appeared to be a calm period, but in fact it was turned upside down. On the one hand, capitalist material civilization is advancing by leaps and bounds. On the other hand, with the progress of science, the development of productive forces and the intensification of social contradictions, the traditional foundation on which Christianity depends has been destroyed, and the old values and ethical concepts have also been fundamentally shaken. As the author of this poem described in the preface: "There is no belief that will not be shaken, no long-held doctrine that will not be doubted, and no recognized tradition that will not be disintegrated." When old beliefs collapse, new beliefs cannot be established immediately. People lost their spiritual support, became extremely anxious and fell into a depression full of anxiety and anxiety. Dover Beach embodies such a mentality. It can be said that it is a tidal wall chart of Victorian ideology in Britain, which has a strong sense of the times.
Arnold once claimed that poetry was inferior to Tennyson, intelligence and vitality were inferior to Browning, but in the integration of the two, he might surpass the first two. Dover beach really proves this. This poetic image is full and profound, which not only shows rich artistic imagination, but also shows a high degree of logical power. From the writing point of view, poetry is from the outside into the heart, from the scene into thinking, and in expressing ideas, on the one hand, it is progressive and clear; On the other hand, it has never left the concrete and vivid wave image. The genre used in the poem is a free-form poem that the author doesn't often see that day. It is characterized by using uncertain lines and uneven lines as much as possible, so it is more flexible, but it still rhymes with feet, and the way of rhyming is more complicated.
(Peng Shaojian)