多佛海滩DoverBeach

多佛海滩

马修·阿诺德（1822-1888）

王道余 译

今夜海面平静。

潮水涨满，明月高悬

海峡之上；对面法国海岸

灯光明灭；英格兰绝壁耸立；

远处的宁静海湾，闪烁、无边。

快来窗边，夜晚空气如蜜甜！

唯一的是，从那长长的海浪线，

从那大海和月光漂洗的土地交会之地，

听啊！你听得见那嘎吱嘎吱的呐喊那是海浪带着卵石退去，又抛起，再次回来时，将其送上高地，

一来，一去，周而复始，

有张有驰，不慌不急，带来了

忧愁的永恒调子。

远古的索福克勒斯

曾在爱琴海将它听见，带给

他脑子的是人类不幸之污浊的

落落起起；我们

在这声音里也找到一个思想，

当在这遥远的北海岸边将它听见。

信仰之海

也曾一度涨满，围绕地球的海岸

如同一卷明丽的腰带伸展。

但如今我只能听见

它忧郁、绵长、退却的呐喊，

在后撤，和着夜风的

呼吸，撤下这个世界硕大阴沉的边缘

和赤裸的碎石滩。

啊，爱人，让我们彼此

忠诚坚贞！因为这个世界，它

像梦幻之地在我们面前摊开，

如此多样，如此美丽，如此崭新，

其实没有欢乐，没有爱情，也没有光明，

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没有确定，没有平和，痛苦也没有助援；

而我们在此也如同身处暗夜的平交兵。

原，

响遍了抗争斗杀的阵阵杂乱警鸣，

有如无知的队伍趁夜Dover Beach (published in 1867), is the most famous poem by Matthew

Arnold and is generally considered one of the most important poems of

the 19th century.[1] It was first published in the collection New Poems.

Analysis

"Dover Beach," says Park Honan, "opens with images of confidence and

beauty and profound security." Reflecting the traditional notion that the

poem was written during Arnold's honeymoon (see Date of composition

below), he goes on to say, "The speaker might be talking to his bride in

a moonlit city near glimmering chalk cliffs."

[2] Allott notes that "in ll. 1-6

much of the effectiveness of the descriptions depends on the high

proportion of monosyllables单音节字 and the simplicity of the key

epithets 'calm', 'fair', 'tranquil'. In l.6 the window is approached and the

sweetness of the air felt before the sound of the sea is first heard in the

following lines."[3] Allott also detects an echo of Senancour's Obermann

in these opening lines.[4]

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.

In the second section of the poem, Arnold invokes Sophocles (495 BC -

406 BC) who was, Allott tells us, "Arnold's favourite Greek dramatist."

Allott goes on, however, to point out that "no passage in the plays [of

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Sophocles] is strictly applicable" to the passage in "Dover Beach".

[5]

Tinker and Lowry suggest passages from the plays Antigone, The Women

of Trachis, Oedipus at Colonus, and Philoctetes. But they add that "the

Greek author has reference only to the successive blows of Fate which

fall upon a particular family which has been devoted to destruction by the

gods. The plight described metaphorically by the English poet is

conceived to have fallen upon the whole human race."[6] Allott feels that

the passage from the Trachiniae (The Women of Trachis) is closest. Also

of note in this section, Arnold echoes the "distant northern shore" of line

20 in ll. 80-82 of his "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" which

appears to have been written at about the same time.

[7]

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegean, 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.

Honan calls the final lines "the most deeply felt seventeen lines ever

written by a modern English poet."

[8] He also connects the "vast edges

drear" to a possible memory of Wastwater in the Lake District, which

Honan describes as "mountainous grey 'scree' running into translucent

depths of water."

[9]

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.

The "famous simile" in the final lines "descriptive of armies engaged in

dubious conflict by night, was probably inspired by the well-known

passage in Thucydides' account of the battle of Epipolae. Here are to be

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found the details used by Arnold: a night-attack, fought upon a

plain at the top of a cliff, in the moonlight, so that the soldiers

could not distinguish clearly between friend and foe, with the

resulting flight of certain Athenian troops, and various 'alarms,'

watchwords, and battle-cries shouted aloud to the increasing

confusion of all."[10] Honan notes that John Henry Newman had

used the image once "when he defined controversy as a sort of 'night

battle'" and the image also occurs in Arthur Hugh Clough's The Bothie of

Tober-na-Vuolich.[11] Tinker and Lowry point out that "there is evidence

that the passage about the 'night-battle' was familiar coin among

Rugbeians" at the time Arnold attended Rugby and studied under his

father Dr. Thomas Arnold.[12] "The poem's discourse," Honan tells us,

"shifts literally and symbolically from the present, to Sophocles on the

Aegean, from Medeieval Europe back to the present—and the auditory

and visual images are dramatic and mimetic and didactic. Exploring the

dark terror that lies beneath his happiness in love, the speaker

resolves to love—and exegencies of history and the nexus

between lovers are the poem's real issues. That lovers may be

'true/To one another' is a precarious notion: love in the modern city,

momentarily gives peace, but nothing else in a post-medieval society

reflects or confirms the faithfulness of lovers. Devoid of love and light the

world is a maze of confusion left by 'retreating' faith."[13]

Composition

According to Tinker and Lowry, "a draft of the first twenty-eight lines of

the poem" were written in pencil "on the back of a folded sheet of paper

containing notes on the career of Empedocles."[14] Allott concludes that

the notes are probably from around 1849-50.[15] "Empedocles on Etna,"

again according to Allott, was probably written 1849-52, the notes on

Empedocles are likely to be contemporary with the writing of that poem.

[16] The final line of this draft is:

And naked shingles of the world. Ah love &c

Tinker and Lowry conclude that this "seem[s] to indicate that the last

nine lines of the poem as we know it were already in existence when the

portion regarding the ebb and flow of the sea at Dover was composed."

This would make the manuscript "a prelude to the concluding paragraph"

of the poem in which "there is no reference to the sea or tides."[17]

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,

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Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help from pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Arnold's visits to Dover may also provide some clue to the date of

composition. Allott has Arnold in Dover in June 1851 and again in

October of that year "on his return from his delayed continental

honeymoon." To critics who conclude that ll. 1-28 were written at Dover

and ll. 29-37 "were rescued from some discarded poem," Allott suggests

the contrary, i.e. that the final lines "were written at Dover in late June,"

while " ll. 29-37 were written in London shortly afterwards."

[18]

Influence

Anthony Hecht, US Poet Laureate, replied to Dover Beach" in his poem

"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."

The anonymous figure to whom Arnold addresses his poem becomes the

subject of Hecht's poem. In Hecht's poem she "caught the bitter allusion

to the sea", imagined "what his whiskers would feel like / On the back of

her neck", and felt sad as she looked out across the channel. "And then

she got really angry" at the thought that she had become "a sort of

mournful cosmic last resort." After which she says "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.[19]

Kenneth and Miriam Allott, referring to "Dover Bitch" as "an irreverent

jeu d'esprit," nonetheless see, particularly in the line "a sort of mournful

cosmic last resort," an extension of the original's poem main theme.[20]

"Dover Beach" has been mentioned in of a number of novels, plays,

poems, and films. Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 alludes to the poem in

the chapter Havermyer: "the open-air movie theater in which—for the

daily amusement of the dying—ignorant armies clashed by night on a

collapsible screen." In Fahrenheit 451, author Ray Bradbury has his

protagonist Guy Montag read part of "Dover Beach" to his wife Mildred

and her friends. Samuel Barber composed a setting of "Dover Beach" for

string quartet and baritone. In Dodie Smith's novel, I Capture the Castle,

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the book's protagonist remarks that Debussy's Clair de Lune reminds her

of "Dover Beach" (in the film adaptation of the novel, the character

quotes (or, rather, misquotes) a line from the poem). It is also

mentioned in Saturday by Ian McEwan, The Last Gentleman by Walker

Percy, A Song For Lya by George R.R. Martin, Rush song "Armour and

Sword", from the album Snakes and Arrows (lyrics by Neil Peart), Nora's

Lost, a short drama by Alan Haehnel, Daljit Nagra's prize-winning poem

"Look We Have Coming to Dover!" which quotes the line, "So various, so

beautiful, so new" as its epigraph, and the poem "Moon" by Billy Collins.

Kevin Kline's character, Cal Gold, in the film The Anniversary Party

recites part of "Dover Beach" as a toast. The poem has also provided a

ready source for titles: A Darkling Plain by Philip Reeve, As On a Darkling

Plain by Ben Bova (the title refers to a lunar plain covered with strange

unexplained artifacts), Clash by Night a play by Clifford Odets (later

made into a film noir by Fritz Lang), and Norman Mailer's National Book

Award winner The Armies of the Night about the 1967 March on the

Pentagon.

Even in the U. S. Supreme Court thepoem has had its influence: Justice

William Rehnquist, in his concurring opinion in Northern Pipeline Co. v.

Marathon Pipe Line Co., 458 U.S. 50 (1982), compared judicial decisions

regarding the power of Congress to create legislative courts to

"landmarks on a judicial 'darkling plain' where ignorant armies have

clashed by night."

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