Well, the first two stanzas are
about women with a certain color of hair, “half tan,” to which the speaker
never fails to respond, and about a woman he stayed with in Pasadena, with that
color hair I guess, and sorry, but I’m terribly uninterested in that. Is
stuffed, de world, wif tan-haired girls. This line is odd enough that it’s
interesting: “Murdered the ruses that would quack me clear / The orchard
squeaks.” Except that it’s probably about a tryst or trysts in some orchard,
and like I say, I’m terribly uninterested in that. Then there’s this to end
things: “Cal has always manifested a most surprising affection / for Matthew
Arnold,—who is not a rat but whom / I can quite take or leave.” It comes out of
nowhere, making this Dream Song an unfocused ho-hum in sum. And there’s the
pretty standard dismissal of Matthew Arnold, which I’ve never quite understood.
What’s with that?
Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172844
is one of my favorite poems. Period. It has been endlessly anthologized, but
that’s because it’s not only great, it’s teachable. I’ve gone over it dozens of
time with students. I can say, without irony, that very few works of literature
have taught me more than this one poem, both about poetry and about modernism, the
poem’s real subject. I could analyze it in detail. But, briefly: It starts with
descriptions of the night and the surf on the shoreline. That line “The Sea of
Faith” switches the poem from literal description of the beach to metaphor, while
using the same beachy images. With all the allusions to withdrawal and
receding, the point is made about modernism: The things we once depended on
(like faith) are withdrawing from our grasp. There is a terrible sense of
anxiety that comes with that knowledge. “Love, let us be true to one another.”
This is a grasping onto something we can trust—love. For the world, which seems
so wonderful, is really none of that. The last lines—I find them haunting and
amazing. “we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of
struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
I gather that to admit you love
this poem is something like saying you’re still a great fan of Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best. It’s hokey. It’s
passé. They may have been popular, but these TV shows never were very good
anyway. We’ve moved on and so should you. The poet, Anthony Hecht, wrote one of
those scathing parodies that Jonathon Swift was so deadly at. Hecht’s “The Dover
Bitch” http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/dover-bitch
pretty much finished off “Dover Beach” in the minds of serious academic poets,
I think. And these lines, I admit, are killer:
To have been brought
All the way down
from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of
mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough
on a girl, and she was pretty.
A “mournful cosmic last resort”?
Ouch! The satire bites. Well, when something is overblown and worn out, then
satirical demolition is appropriate. Swift’s “Description of a City Shower” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180932
was the coup de grâce for poems ending with a heroic
rhymed triplet. His final three lines were so devastating that the form never
recovered:
Sweepings from
butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drowned puppies,
stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats, and
turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood.
Swift’s poem, all the way
through, is hilarious. Heroic rhymed triplets are long gone, but even in Swift’s
day, the form needed to be dealt with and he took on the task and skewered it
dead. Did “Dover Beach” need such treatment, as it got? I don’t think so.
One summer when my son was about
three, we had this ritual. I would take his wooden building blocks and
construct elaborate sculptures with them at night when he was in bed. I mean,
these things were good. I loved my
little son, and I would focus all that, direct it into an intense sculptural
creativity—with his wooden blocks. I made towers, domes, I would channel Frank
Lloyd Wright one night, the Russian Expressionists the next. Some of the towers
were six feet high. I built an arch with a keystone, pointed Gothic arches with
flying buttresses, a dome with a hole in the top. On and on. He would get up in
the morning, the innocent little savage, and kick them down. Sometimes I would
hold him back, say, “Look! This is a channeling of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie
Style. See the corner windows? The overhanding rooflines?” Of course, I might
as well have been explaining architectural theory to my cat. As soon as I turned
him loose he gleefully demolished my fabulous work of art without so much as a
quiver of appreciation for the intricacy and erudition captured so elegantly in
the sculptural forms. It was all great fun, and I recognized the devastating
satirist in my three year old son.
That’s pretty much what I think
of “The Dover Bitch.” I like Matthew
Arnold, thank you very much.
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