Hello and welcome back to the daily poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

Today's poem, Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold, will be read by our guest reader, Andrew Kern.

Without further...

...dover Beach, a poem by Matthew Arnold.

The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full. The moon lies fair upon the streets.

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 as 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. Sopocles 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 thought,

hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The sea of faith was once too at the full,

"'and round earth 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,

...