ABSTRACT
Mathew Arnold’s “Dover beach” (written in 1876) may be one of the most beautiful poems in the English language: beautiful for its music and its imagery; for its historical scope and philosophical clarity; for its honest ambivalence: optimism against pessimism; for the way it sets the beauty of the natural world against the melancholy of loss—and against uncertainty and existential anxiety; for its meditation on what love can mean.
