When I was in college, a very eccentric English lit professor enthusiastically walked into class one day; that day we were to discuss Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold. He asked if anyone in the class considered this their favorite poem. My hand shot up just before another student raised his hand. Before I knew it, the professor was bounding up the stairs of the lecture hall with a 78 vinyl record and handed it to me. It was a recording of an opera singer singing the poem! It was hideous when I went home and played it. Over the years it got tossed on one of my moves, and I regret that. It was a special gift from a special person. I should have kept it for that reason alone.

I thought of that poem the other night. It has not been easy to be married during the pandemic, hell it’s not easy to be married under normal circumstances. The world seems to be falling apart, we are aging, friends and family our age are beginning to fail before our eyes. We are always potentially one doctor’s appointment away from bad news ourselves. We are saddened by the chaos of politics and social dysfunction. It is much too easy to take it out on each other. We’re working through it, but some days it feels like we have lost our ability to communicate or be kind to each other.

Suddenly this poem, which I have always loved for its nod to fidelity in the face of temporal and spiritual uncertainty in general, has taken on a more profound and personal meaning. Recalling it made me consider that I have been saving that poem in my heart all these years for just this moment, when I would understand deeply what it means to stand with my beloved as on a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night. I am glad we have each other and tomorrow will be another day for us together.

Dover Beach

BY MATTHEW ARNOLD

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.