Word: arnolds
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...searching for a modern Dover Beach, it might help to pause first at Arnold's. What must have been, in Arnold's time, an attractively hectic seaside resort and sailing port seems strangely lifeless now, in spite of the fact that Dover remains one of the largest passenger ports in the world. Huge, squat ferries chug efficiently and frequently between Dover and Calais. Travelers walk a few steps from a train to a boat and are off. The ease and speed with which a Channel crossing is now done may have deprived Dover of its 19th century character, except...
Exactly where Mr. and Mrs. Arnold honeymooned, no one seems to know. In fact nothing in the Dover town records or in the town history books mentions Arnold or his famous poem. If the Arnolds stopped at the grandest of the town's hotels in 1851, it would have been the Lord Warden, a square, elegant, four- story structure where Dickens gave readings and Napoleon III stayed the night. In those days one would not simply hop a train after a ship ride, but would plan to spend some restful time in Dover before proceeding inland...
...former Lord Warden Hotel now houses the customs and excise offices. From a window on the top floor, it is still possible to hear "the grating roar of pebbles" that Arnold heard on the beach at night. A recent morning was very still. The steel-and-concrete docks jutted out into the harbor; a hovercraft bobbed passively on the water; passengers moved single file from a ferry to a train that soon started up, shrieked metal on metal and moved on. The sea continually changed color and direction, the sun laying a slice of silver on the horizon, which faded...
From a similar window 134 years ago, Arnold beheld his progressive, aggressive world and began serenely: "The sea is calm tonight./ The tide is full, the moon lies fair/ Upon the Straits . . . Come to the window, sweet is the night air!" A long, successful life lay ahead of him. His new bride was near by. But by the end of the stanza, he was hearing the "eternal note of sadness" in the sea and the rolling of the pebbles, and by the second stanza, the "ebb and flow/ Of human misery" was overwhelming. The final lines of Dover Beach...
...Dover Beach the same place as Arnold's? Certainly the disjuncture between feeling and intellect--or science and emotion--has only seemed to widen since the mid-19th century. The transition from the industrial society to what Daniel Bell called the post-industrial society, consisting of services rather than manufacturing, has resulted in a difference of occupations but not of attitude; people are more than ever the bewildered children of progress. The past year alone has produced enough scientific inventiveness to shake the spirit for a lifetime: the first baby from a frozen embryo, surrogate mothers, genetic transfers between animals...