Dover Beach

The first stanza of “Dover Beach” is a confusion of senses: sight, taste, and sound. The stanza begins with a visual description of the landscape outside the speaker’s window. The opening lines describe the sea, the moonlight, the French coast, and the White Cliffs of Dover (Lines 1-5). When the speaker calls his lover over, however, it is not to admire the view, but to taste the air: “Come to the window, sweet is the night-air” (Line 6). Only, on the next two lines, the speaker is no longer describing the air outside the window, but the sea spray far below, and he is not describing the taste of that spray. Instead, he is focused on the sound. He instructs his lover: “Listen! you hear the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling” (Lines 9-10). Since the sea is calm, the waves are small, and the pebbles are moving slowly, but ceaselessly. This “tremulous” and “slow” rhythm (Line 13) penetrates the speaker and brings: “The eternal note of sadness in” (Line 14).

Added to this confusion of senses is a confusion of rhyme. The 14 lines of the first stanza do not follow a fixed rhyme-scheme, but they do rhyme haphazardly abacdbdcefcgfg.