Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. This week I thought I'd look at what

you might call a poem poem and by that I mean the kind of poem that people who don't read

poetry expect a poem to be. So this particular one has a moonlit beach, the roar of the sea,

troubled soul, brooding on the futility of life and there's a few classical references as well

to give it a bit of class and I think that's what people want from a poem if they want to poem a

tour. This one is a very famous piece by Matthew Arnold, the Victorian writer. One of those Victorians

who gets called a sage, a big thinker about the world, big sideburns, that kind of a guy. I

think a brilliant poet as well but Matthew Arnold wrote this poem Dover Beach which was published in

1867, probably written, well everything suggests written in 1851. So I'm going to read you the first

bit of Dover Beach and you'll get the tone. The sea is calm tonight. I'll tell you what you've

got to be really careful of when you read Dover Beach is that you don't do the voice. It's very

tempting to do it. You know that sort of when people read poetry that you've got to fight that

because oh it can lead you into it this this poem. So let me just on Geel Good myself okay.

The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full. The moonlight's fair upon the straits. On the French

coast the light leems 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. So he's clearly addressing a second

person in this first bit and it starts, I mean it's beautiful isn't it the sea is calm. The

moonlight's fair upon the straits as a tranquil bay. Sweet is the night air. It all sounds

lovely but there's just a couple of hints I think even at this early stage that all is not well

here and the person that he speaks to maybe he is hiding some deeper thoughts because that bit

on the French coast the light gleams and is gone. Now that surely right early on in this poem

is an image of loss. It's an image of something being tantalizingly out of reach.

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