Dover Beach

The tone of this poem does a complete 180 as is made evident by the comparison of the first line of the poem (“The sea is calm tonight”) to the last line of the poem (“Where ignorant armies clash by night”). At first the narrator looks out onto a scene of waves crashing against a beach and is so taken by its beauty that he calls his lover to the window to enjoy it with him. But this tone of peacefulness stops as soon as he listens to what is going on, and words such as “calm”, “fair”, “tranquil”, and “sweet” are replaced by “grating”, “roar” and “tremulous.” By the end of the first stanza he has woven his internal feelings of sorrow into the natural action of waves hitting the beach, and it brings “the eternal note of sadness in.”
The second stanza transports us to a different time and place, where the Aegean Sea represents “the turbid ebb and flow of human misery” to the Greek tragedian, Sophocles. The end of the stanza takes us back to present day, where the two of them can “hear” the same thing looking at a different sea.
The third stanza also starts off in the past, with the sea now the “Sea of Faith.” This faith used to be “full” and encompassed the whole Earth, but as the tense shifts to present, we see that this sea is now receding and is about to dry up. The world used to be fully clothed in its faith, but now it stands naked and in the dark as its faith begins to drain away.
In the last stanza the narrator starts off with the dramatic proposal: “let us be true to one another!” He sees this as the only way to combat the deceptive world that is devoid of joy, love, light, certitude, peace and help from pain. Sight is deceptive because the world only “seems…so beautiful, so new”, so hearing is the only way to discover the true nature of the world. He is saying that they can only control how they act towards each other while they are surrounded by “a darkling plain.”