Word: dover
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...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 are racked with disillusionment about a "world which seems/ To lie before us like a land of dreams,/ So various, so beautiful, so new," but that had "neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." The only way to survive what Arnold in another poem called...
...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...
...divorce of intellect and feeling is the wrong place to look for a modern Dover Beach, however, it may yet have bearing on the right one. The world does not look as unremittingly bleak as Arnold painted it in those final lines of Dover Beach (How could it?), but it often can feel that bleak--minus joy, love, light, certitude, peace and help for pain. As yet, no industry has disinvented poverty or starvation. And one advanced invention threatens to turn the earth into a polar waste. Even if most people learn to adjust to machines or the new science...