Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur” are similar in that both poems praise the beauty of the natural world and deplore man’s role in that world. The style and tone of each poem is quite different, however. Arnold writes in an easy, flowing style and as the poem develops, reveals a deeply melancholy point of view. Hopkins writes in a very compressed, somewhat jerky style, using sentences heavy with alliteration and metaphors. His tone, though touched with sadness and perhaps even anger at man, unlike Arnold’s poem, reveals an abiding sense of hope. Basically, each poet is presenting a very different view of Faith, and consequently of man’s ultimate condition.
Matthew Arnold begins his poem by describing a calm, beautiful scene. Dover Beach is lying “fair” in the moonlight. It is high tide and he sees the coast of France and “the cliffs of England… / Gleaming and vast, out in the tranquil bay.” All seems lovely and quiet. According to Baum’s research on the date and circumstances of the poem, Arnold is probably speaking to his new bride (86) as he says, “Come to the window, sweet is the night-air.” But gradually the reader senses a shifting of mood and tone. Now he describes the “line of spray… / Where the sea meets” the land as “moon-blanched.” And the tide, tossing pebbles as it comes, is a “grating roar” with a “tremulous cadence slow” that “bring[s] / The eternal note of sadness in.” This melancholy mood grows deeper as he thinks of man’s long span of history– “The turbid ebb and flow / of human misery.”
In the next stanza beginning with line twenty-one, Arnold gets to the reason …
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… in a sky that is brown, not completely black because God’s Spirit is hovering in love over the dark world still, like a mother dove brooding over her nest.
Obviously, both poets recognize the darkness in the world; and both see love as a light in the darkness. Arnold’s love is human love from one individual to another and even that seems uncertain. The redeeming love Hopkins speaks of is God’s love for man and His creation. That love is unchanging and indestructible–an abiding hope in the darkness. What a difference faith can make.
Works Cited
Baum, Paull F. Ten Studies in the Poetry of Matthew Arnold. Durham: Duke UP, 1961.
Boyle, Robert S.J. Metaphor in Hopkins. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1961.
Kirszner, Laurie G. and Stephen R. Mandell. Literature: Reading Reacting Writing. 3rd ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt, 1991.
Analysis of e. e. cummings’ Poem of all the blessings which to man
Analysis of e. e. cummings’ Poem of all the blessings which to man
As Thomas Reed West puts it, “the predominant literary sentiment toward the discipline of the machine has been one of lament” (xii). Many authors have composed pieces dealing with industrialization and the correlated obsolescence of man. Poet e.e. cummings is among them. In his poem “of all the blessings which to man,” cummings describes a world to which progress will doom mankind– a place where technology rules over humanity.
Cummings’s poem opens saying that the most supreme gift progress offers mankind is “the an/ imal without a heart” (3-4). This heartless living thing is the machine. Machines can be made to act, and can often appear as if they think, but cannot feel. This is the greatest present presented to us by progress? To view that as a gift is to hold logic highly supreme over emotion, a preference this piece laments as being unfortunately accepted.
This industrialization and elimination of the need for humans is similarly unfeeling and coldly logical. The age of machinery presents its nearly silent coup d’etat rebels, the mechanical beings themselves, as a huge “collective pseudobeast,” aimed at eliminating not only a need for humanity but a need for emotion (5). The poem’s speaker notes that this being only preexists “its hoi in its polloi” (8). This shows the aim these machines allegedly have– not simply to overtake the teeming masses of people but to become the teeming masses (hoi polloi) themselves, even to make humanity forget that they were ever in charge. This hearkens to the government employees constantly rewriting history in George Orwell’s 1984, as these machines hope to make the people forget how things eve…
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…y have done too good of a job. Their creation will change them from tame rulers to beings whose prolific creation (“teem”) overcomes them.
Movies and literature alike have often served to villainize technology. These topics survive and persist, perhaps because we are morbidly fascinated with our own predicted downfall. Many people will admit to being concerned, as cummings is in “of all the blessings which to man,” that the world will one day be run by machines. This potential future governing force is “without a heart” and “couldn’t use a mind,” and that may scare humans most of all (25, 28).
Works Cited
Rotella, Guy. “Nature, Time, and Transcendence in Cummings’ Later Poems.” Critical Essays on E.E. Cummings. Ed. Guy Rotella. Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1984.
West, Thomas Reed. Flesh of Steel. Charlotte, NC: Heritage Printers, 1967.