Ok, so if this is not after all off-topic... Robert's mention of being entrapped by a woman reminds me of a proverb where Solomon warns his son to beware "the evil woman, ...the smooth tongue of the adulteress. Do not desire her beauty in your heart, and do not let her capture you with her eyelashes..." (Pr.6:24,25) The snare isn't so much the woman, as the desire for intimacy without any committment to the woman... Could there be something of this aspect in the Keats' poem?

Doesn't anyone have anything to say about 8. "Dover Beach," by Matthew Arnold? Where is Penny when you need her, oh right, she is in Belgium. Dover Beach get's 4 dings from me. As I type, it occurs to me that sometimes I react to a poem strictly from personal preference and sometimes from a more analytical place. I like this poem, but not at the 4 ding level (3). I give it 4 dings because of how sucessful it is as a poem. Thinking about this makes me want to go back over my evaluation of some of the poems I have rated.

Right, I think the place we come to the more experience we have with an art form is not relying on the closeness of the match between "it" and us. Not that we'll ever get away from "liking" or ever should, but we do come to have a more disinterested view of the subject, appreciating it somewhat apart from that comforting feeling we have when the subject is identifying with us. Our "ding" system can be either a way of registering this identification, or it can be approval of a different, more objective sort.

That's a theory, anyway. Coming to "Dover Beach," I'm not able to be objective at all, since the poem hits all my spots on a primary level. Its air of philosophical melancholy is something that always draws me in. It's interesting to speculate about what produced the apparently new feeling in poetry that life may have no satisfying order to it, that even the beauty of nature is a false front. The Romantics had left religious faith behind, but thought that nature, or even poetry, could be our religion. There wasn't an acknowledgment of emptiness that we find in "DB." The poem was published in 1867, and it's tempting to link the fear of the speaker with the removal of religious scaffolding after The Origin of the Species in 1859. But the poem was written probably 5 years before Darwin's work appeared. It could be the effect of succeeding revolutions in Europe that give the speaker the terrifying sense that all is flux and there is no certainty to be had as there once was when faith prevailed. This makes sense in view of the final image, maybe one of the greatest in poetry, in which "ignorant armies clash by night."

This is a super-serious poem, a quality that can invite parody. Sure enough, Anthony Hecht did that in "The Dover Bitch."

DW: Thanks for posting about Dover Beach. I read back over it and that last stanza is a killer. Sometimes I am too impatient when I read a poem, racing to the "punch" and not appreciating how I got there. The power of the last stanza of Dover Beach depends on the gradual unfolding of this poem.

Point of interest: I have been reading essays by Wendell Berry and came across one on poetry called, "The Responsibility of the Poet." It is well worth wading in. This essay appears in What Are People For?

7. "Kubla Khan," by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge's extremely wide reading, his unfortunate dependence on laudanum, and his floating off into a dream, combine to produce one of the favorite poems of the world.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

DWill wrote:8. "Dover Beach," by Matthew Arnold. Harmon says that this poem, written in the mid-1800s, could be the first modern poem and might even be "modernist, in the way it places an isolated neurotic on the edge of a highly charged symbolic scene. The lines are broken and uneven; some of the transitions are abrupt, almost surrealist."

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!

There is an old line of English bigotry, 'the wogs begin at Calais'. This arrogant sense that England is the world and that Europeans are inferior was central to empire. So the contrast between the 'glimmering and vast' England and the 'gone light' of France. Yet there is a wistful sense that this English imperial arrogance is false, that its derision of European culture is puffed up denial of the cultural superiority of European depth.

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.

The rhythmic pulse of waves marks the passage of time and the sadness of loss.

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.

Mundane worldly reality is a vale of tears, with the new empire, Britain, a retelling of the old empire, Greece.

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.

Don Cupitt's book and movement The Sea of Faith takes its title from this verse.

"SoF is most closely associated with ... the belief that God has no "real", objective, or empirical existence, independent of human language and culture; God is "real" in the sense that He is a potent symbol, metaphor or projection, but He has no objective existence outside and beyond the practice of religion. Non-realism therefore entails a rejection of all supernaturalism, including concepts such as miracles, the afterlife, and the agency of spirits. Cupitt wrote, "God is the sum of our values, representing to us their ideal unity, their claims upon us and their creative power".[1] Cupitt calls this "a voluntarist interpretation of faith: a fully demythologized version of Christianity". It entails the claim that even after we have given up the idea that religious beliefs can be grounded in anything beyond the human realm, religion can still be believed and practised in new ways."

There is also an echo in Yeats' idea that the former certainty has evaporated as part of an inexorable natural cycle of the evolution of spirituality.

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.

This sense that faith offers no hope, because the world is devoid of virtue, with all high ideals nothing but a charade, leads Arnold to say that love between actual people is the only hope, as ideals of universal love have evaporated in doubt. We are left with the question of the identity of the ignorant armies. Perhaps the church and the modern world are meant, contesting at a level of ignorance while the higher truth of the cyclic rhythm of nature continues in sublime indifference to human imagination.

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Beach

The Dover Beach has me still chewing on it.... I am letting it mellow there and seeing what comes of it. I think that it is TOO full of stuff for one sitting, like eating an entire cake or roast, you need to digest a bit before having more. I don't know if I like it all that much, but it definitely gives my brain something to play with while I am mindlessly slinging pizzas and making schedules and all that my job entails.

I think Kubla Kahn shows too much drug use and not enough substance. It reminds me of the eternal stoner contemplating the cool randomness of their thoughts and making me listen to them as well. I bet if I was stoned I would like that one a lot more, rather like The Wall by Pink Floyd....

Yes, I can see what you mean by the "stoner" aspect of KK.

This one is a different story entirely. 6. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," by Robert Frost. In a 1963 edition of Frost's complete poems, the editor, Edward Connery Lathem, made a controversial change to this poem, involving only a single comma. He was certain that Frost merely overlooked placing a comma after "dark" in line 13, so he added it. There was an outcry, and if you compare the change in meaning I think you can see why.


Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

YaY! it has finally arrived! I did take a peek in the list so I knew it was coming up. This is my favorite poem of all time. Not only in the concrete world of things I like to do and see and experience, you can actually hear snowflakes falling in a quiet wood, so in a very literal sense this poem is a homecoming. It does for my soul what sitting on a beach listening to the waves or laying an a flowery meadow smelling the green growing all around does. It instantly pulls me away from today and now and gives me the peace of meditation or the relaxation of the afterglow of good sex. Seriously it is that good for me.

It is also a good poem to chew on, I have never resolved the last two lines, and I think that he quite possibly meant many different things at the same time. I don't usually buy the suicide contemplation angle, I almost never have, except that sometimes life only gives you rotten lemons for a bit so maybe he did. I usually stay within the interpretation that he is glad that he had a lot of good miles left in him. Sometimes I think about how those miles could be cold and tedious, and this was a little break of loveliness first. Then again he could be looking forward to those miles and thus the need to get on with his journeying.

Others do the scholarly analysis so much better than I do, but I did want to mention some of the stuff banging around in my head about this one..

and 10 million trillion bajillion dings too

Why does it matter if the owner of the woods will see him stopping or not? It matters more that the horse thinks it odd to be stopping perhaps.

When you are looking around the internet you can see that the extra comma appears here and there too

froglipz wrote:
and 10 million trillion bajillion dings too

Lots of dings from me too. I find much comfort in reading this poem.

Others do the scholarly analysis so much better than I do, but I did want to mention some of the stuff banging around in my head about this one..

You did great. Thanks so much for posting. When other people post it makes this feel like a conversation rather than me talking to myself.