Matthew Arnold's Cry from the Cross

Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," written in 1867, is generally felt to be the opening of the door to modern poetry--in theme, in tone, in tension. Certainly, Spicer's poetry--with its long, restless, coast watches and undercurrent of surf sounds--is unthinkable without this incredible lyric poem. In 1993, poet Ed Dorn, who wrote about the affliction of distance and wander-lust as ways, means and ends in themselves, talked about this poem with the deepest understanding I have ever found. I thought I'd share his remarks and let you use them as a lens or prism to guide your own reading of this most bravely beautiful poem of the 19th century and, possibly, all time. Before doing say, let me share some thoughts about "Dover Beach."

For me, the poem is Christ's cry from the cross, "O God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" sounded as a necessarily unanswered, unanswerable question by each man who seeks to end a perpetual sense of solitary confinement in what Alan watts called "the skin-encapsulated ego." Other gospels have sweeter, more reconciled cries from Christ. But for most men, this is the most resonance and relevant cry. Arnold ends his poem with that tragic sense of estrangement from purpose of meaning--other than an existential one. Is there peace? Is there comfort?

To find it, I have had to go forward past the consolations of religion.

Waiting for Godot on a New Jersey beach

As I re-read "Dover Beach" through Dorn's eyes, I sense how the Zen idea of no-mind is the only cure or relief for this very modern sense of being stranded; this existential gulag-ization of self that makes Rumi, Yunnes Emre, Han Shan, Kabir and our own local manifestation Walt Whitman such medicinal marijuana. God has become for me the peaceful, practiced gaze into all this distance where, as the Zen poets say, "mountains walk and talk with us." "By now the clouds know me," writes a Chinese poet. These clouds are not found in a Golgotha sky.

Any other God but the pantheist God merged with his creation is dead for me--certainly the God of religion who sends sons to die on crosses or summons them on stallions to the 7th heaven (this world, then, of necessity, becoming the 8th heaven of return).

The Dis-consolations of Religion

Religion, I have decided, has about as much to do with God as guns do peace. The temptation is to make religion a means of deliverance, of Logos-delivery, a necessary evil (disguised as good). So we put "In God We Trust" on the coinage and "one nation under God" in the oath sworn to nation. We imprison God in our money, in our patriotism. We abrogate him to greed, to hatred. Our founding fathers were right to want separation between church and state. We need to protect that separation now more than ever before. We need to see that separation as a courtesy of freedom and a rule of the road.

In short: Atheism is no longer disbelief for me. It is a blessed exhaustion. It is a required commutation from solitary confinement and self-inflicted, self-perpetuated duality. It is a necessary remedy for religion. Religion, to me, creates an unbridgeable distance where we wander like Forrest Gumps on a pointless pilgrimage that never ends or reaches any destination (unless the ground under our own feet). Atheism is a letting go of God grasped with any but empty hands and grateful open hearts. God is the emergence of the soul (which when exercised is the fullest faculty of comprehension) in daily life. Otherwise we live in alienation between source and its solace of the here and now. Indeed, our despoliation of the here and now is tantamount to sacrilege.

The Mercy of failure

Ultimately, of course, atheism is provisional, as much a means and therefore illusion as the father-god it seeks to deny. True atheism is severance from deity, from God-conceptualization, from abridgment of consciousness through enslavement to scripture, doctrine and creed. We should, it seems to me, see "Dover Beach" as an early lesson in sheer looking and listening--learning, as Thoreau wrote, from sojourning and as sojourners. It is no accident that all of Christ's sermons and parables are preached on the open road. The teaching is itinerant and portable--a movable feast. Travel is implied by the Way. We still have much to learn on this quickly dwindling planet.

Is Egypt today's Zion?

How ironic that Egypt, the place of so-called bondage and captivity, is now Zion and, as such, freer than the Judeas founded by its displaced slaves. Those Judeas are Judases to the Christ found here and now. Pharaoh, my flat screen taught me yesterday, must be deposed by his own people not defeated in war. If there is a battle to be waged, it is, as my teacher said, a private, inner jihad which no one with any sense or decency would want to wage in public. The freedom-hungry crowds in Tahrir Square have learned more from America than any Americans have for generations. And it has done so without guns or any appendix to free speech that would think speech needed gun guardianship.

Last night, Mo and I watched Arthur Penn's "Little Big Man"--an artful apology and first tiny act of restitution for the de-Zion-ization of America. During one of the slaughter scenes, Mo covered her eyes and asked, "Did this actually happen?" "It's factual," I said. "How can men do this to one another?" she asked. The movie later answered by reminding her (and me) that among the Cheyennes the term "human being" was reserved for natives.

Now to the inspiring matter at hand:

ED: Oh well, sure, maybe that is Romantic, then. I don't know. But if anybody's using the term Romantic, and they don't mean Sheets and Kelly [both laughing], Byron, Whitman, Coleridge, actually I'm not sure what they mean, really, when it comes down to it. I'm not sure I do. I think that's a term that was probably dead by Browning's time, but it stays around. Browning was the last manifestation, if you want to buy, say, Eliot's idea that what that actually produced was a fractionalization of the consciousness and a discontinuity of rational morality and all of that stuff. And you know, you're passing by one of the great poets in the language, of course, who apparently was not infected by the virus of mental dislocation, and I'm talking about Tennyson. But then you finally get to Browning, who somehow managed to build out of this wrecked edifice these long, utterly incomprehensible narratives, that nobody ever figured out--in some sense they never have been figured out--but were compelling enough to read because of the power of the language, and a few crazies still read them. But that's it. That's the end of it. And to me, the poem that puts the nail in the whole thing, and relieves us from ever having to deal with it any more, is "Dover Beach." That, I think, is the tract. And I don't know how it works. I don't know whether Arnold said to himself he was doing this, or whether he said to himself, "I'm just going to write the most beautiful poem ever written, and that's going to be it." Finished. That's it. And then we get into culture as the stuff of poetic concern and procedure. And that's Pound and Eliot, really. I mean, in my simple mind, in my head that's how I hang this all on the graph; that's how I keep it straight.

JW: But what he's putting the nail in is the notion of dislocation?

ED: Well, it's like discontinuity, dislocation, and fragmentation, and the idea that not to know can be a solace and can actually be permitted. And then after that, of course, it's encouraged.

JW: Required.

ED: Of course. And I just think "Dover Beach" summarizes the heart and the flow of feeling of the great tragedy of having lost track and having been set adrift, in its burning beauties. It's like a low flame, but intensely hot, of being lost for good. But nevertheless, take heart if it's possible, if you can find a way. It's lonely out there, the universe is dead, we're all that's left. And that's it, you know. I mean it's so conscious in what it's doing. To me that's the ultimate poem that knows. That poem knows, absolutely knows.

JW: Do you think he's putting his finger on causes and sources?

ED: I don't think he cares, no. It's not like that because, you see, he never wrote another poem of anywhere near that power. And it's not a poem you would have thought he would have written. It's strange. I mean, it's like one of those things, you know--"Matthew Arnold wrote this?"

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 Agean, 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.

1867