Dover Beach 100 Years Later

Below is a photo of a young Anthony Hecht [1923-2004], one of the lights of the post-War period in American poetry. In a generation of traditional versifiers, Hecht was one of the best, but he also transcended the strict forms which he so masterfully employed, in getting at subject-matter than really cut deeply, and personally. 

 

I think what most impressed me when I first read him, in 1968, when I got a copy of his The Hard Hours [Atheneum, 1967], was the evident tension between the propriety of his formal approach, and the strong, frequently sarcastic, even bitter emotion which informed it. (This was also a quality I noted in Edward Dorn's work, though in Dorn, the formal properties were less restrictive, albeit no less compelling.) 

 

The "Quietist" tradition, as Ron Silliman has characterized it, of young poets "proving" themselves through imitation of traditional forms, as a process of apprenticeship to being approved for publication and acceptance within the official literary community, probably explains in part why poets of the generation of Hecht--i.e., Wilbur, Lowell, Jarrell, Schwartz, Plath, Bishop, Simpson, Justice, etc.--all began as formalists, despite having, in several cases, enormous burdens of subject-matter, which would under other circumstances, perhaps have produced novels or straight autobiography. 

 

In Hecht's case, he had seen quite a bit of action in the European Theatre during WWII, and was among the first to witness the Nazi concentration camps--experiences which, by his own account, led to a nervous breakdown in 1959, requiring three months' hospitalization. The weight of that personality convulsion is evident throughout The Hard Hours, a book that feels, in every respect, like the unburdening of a terrific weight. American poets during the 1960's underwent a somewhat notorious crisis of conscience and revaluation. Those who, like Lowell and Hecht and Simpson and Bly, had begun their careers as devoted formalists, heavily influenced by Eliot and Yeats and Auden, performed a kind of public immolation, in which strict forms were burst open to admit the confessional flow of previously forbidden private feeling into the work. The experience and weight of this feeling was presumed to have overwhelmed the medium.

 

In Hecht's case, the phenomenon did not seem expedient or masochistic. The ironies and valorized emotional extremities of his verse in The Hard Hours appeared to bear a genuine relation to lived experience. 

 

The confessional approach to poetic composition is commonly held is disrepute these days, though there is little doubt that much of the best poetry in history has been about personal feeling and experience, even if transmuted through convenient personification and dramatic narrative.

 

Our modern attitudes may seem sophisticated and open-minded, compared, say, to those of 19th Century poets, though, carried to a limit, such presumed openness and tolerance may indeed be nothing more than crass, glib dismissal. Hecht's re-version of Arnold's famous anthology-piece Dover Beach sets up a dialectic between Victorian, and popular Modern, attitudes about love and mortality and belief. Though Hecht's poem is not one of my favorites of his, it demonstrates some of the qualities of his work, which in my view save it from the flummeries of academic versifying, out of which tradition he had originally emerged as a voice.                                

      

Here is Arnold's poem in full--

     Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.
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 Agaean, 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.

Anyone who enjoys poetry will find Arnold's poem a billboard of familiar cliches, softened somewhat by an earlier style of address, and the Victorian pieties which threaten, at all points, to render vivid emotion and direct gesture, helplessly enervating and hesitant. The poem's relaxed, nearly conversational tone disarms us with its apparent frankness, but its underlying prim inhibition is guarded--indeed, that aspect seems to undermine the whole sentiment of the poem. What exactly is Arnold saying in that last stanza, anyway? 

 

That, since the universe is unfriendly, and mankind's history is marked by strife, and "faith" is ebbing, we ought to be "true to one another." A Victorian interpretation of such truth-ful commitment might be honesty, or directness, or frankness. A Modern interpretation might find other kinds of implication. 

 

Here is Hecht's reactive "version" of Arnold's little theatre piece, published about a century later--

   The Dover Bitch

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.'
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. 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.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is, 
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is, 
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.

And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d' Amour.        

This may seem a little crude, at first glance. (Actually, this brand of harshness, or deliberate gaucheness, is a quality one finds often in Hecht's poetry, which is one of the aspects that saves it, at times, from being merely decorative or showy.) Hecht posits a little dramatic scene in which Arnold's poem is seen as an address to "this girl" whom the present Author "knew." The voice of the poem comments disdainfully and condescendingly on both this imaginary Arnold, and his companion. Arnold wants to bed this girl, but she's impatient with his pretentious poetizing, his attempt to yoke her into his quaint literary apostrophe, when all she's really been led to expect is a little affection, some comfortable travel time, and perhaps some sexual diversion. These are, at our remove, 40 years later (since Hecht published his poem) undoubtedly unprincipled and politically incorrect imputations. 

 

And yet, given our cynical tendency to see or to imagine the worst in people, especially uptight, proper Victorian gentlefolk deliberately concealing their carnal desires under a veneer of classical wit or noble sentiment, it might not be too outlandish to propose (or impose) a modern archetype, if for no other purpose than satire or comic relief, upon an otherwise familiar setting. Hecht frequently uses Modern trite attitudes in contrast to time-tested wisdom, distancing himself as Authorial figure in order to facilitate a dramatic trope--which, after all, is what Shakespeare and Arthur Miller and Woody Allen do. Which may serve to soften our indignation a bit, when we realize that the "voice" of Hecht's poem is not in any sense to be confused with direct address. It is, in once way, as curiously removed from the "reality" of the situation as Arnold himself may have been. If, then, Arnold's "true to one another" is meant to suggest nothing more than that in order to bed this lady whom he has brought down to the coast, he must first work himself up into a suitably dignified state of mind.

 

In summary, Hecht's poem seems to be a kind of sarcastic naturalistic dressing-down of traditional costume-drama, an updating of the stale Romantic ideal of forsaken love, in which bestial tendencies are reconciled with staid morality. Hecht's deliberately crass "take" on this trusty old Victorian warhorse may be nothing so preposterous or ill-conceived than a burlesque upon cynical contemporary attitudes. In our im-moral age, in which "Faith" has retreated even farther down the shingle, than it had in Arnold's day, we are certainly no less bestial than people were in Victorian times, though our pretensions may be a bit less decorous.