 
                         20060422.00

         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-blanch'd land,
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 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.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
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.

                     Matthew Arnold
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     "The Sea of Faith" - it seems to me, is a Catholic view
of religious experience; Henry VIII's break with Rome was an
issue of politics, not of faith, not of religious conviction.
Luther never envisaged an ocean of faith.  Implicit in
Matthew Arnold's account is a re-interpretation of
Protestantism or was it the Enlightenment?  as the source of
the darkness of the night in which ignorant armies battle
each other.  Luther turned away from the wickedness of the
world to the love of God and to Jesus.  Matthew Arnold, on
the contrary, turns to an exclusive human relationship.
"Ah, love, let us be true to one another"

                      * * * * *
Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
