“Dover Beach”By : Matthew Arnold (1822-88)
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,
Listen! You hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At there return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sopholces 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”
Lesson notes
Starter
Use oht of the poem to as an starter activity, pupils are to guess what the poem is about/for/ how will it be used in the lesson?And/or “Where was the poet talking about in the UK when he wrote this poem?” Pupils then have to use the locational clues to work out SE England, the more geographically aware will associate the white cliffs with Dover.
Activities
- Read through the poem with the class, emphasising the main points.
- Give pupils 5 minutes to identify the main geographical words/phrases, as this was delivered during a unit on coasts, I then got the pupils to classify the terms into geographical areas ie weather, coasts etc.
- Focussing on the coastal aspect, pupils came up to the screen and underlined those words/phrases they thought had a coastal theme to them.
Q&A session on how the poet had used alternative descriptive words to talk about processes (that he may or may not have been aware of!) eg “turbid ebb and flow”= high/low tide or swash and backwash or “grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling”= erosional processes of abrasion.
- There are other similar links with the weather that the poet is describing and whether it is a cylonic conditions or anticyclonic conditions he is describing (GCSE group, the poem was used as a starter for an activity from the New Key Geography for GCSE resources)
- Pupils were then asked to summarise the geography of the poem in a descriptive paragraph using the model developed by Staffordshire teachers.
- The homework/assessment would be pupils were to construct a similar poem based on anywhere in the world with the following criteria
- The reader had to follow the clues in their poem to work out the location.
- It had to refer to a minimum of 2 coastal processes (marine or weathering)
Thanks to Anthony Cheetham for making aware of this poem.