Compare Yeats & Arnold

Name

Professor

English

9 November 2008

`Dover Beach ' and `When You are Old ' as Expressions of Love

Poetic themes range from love and beauty to war , death and certainly Nature but it is the masterstroke of personal experience embellished with rhetorical devices that make few poetic creations stand out in the crowd . Two such poems reflecting on the meaning of Love in the context of the poets ' personal life are Matthew Arnold 's Dover Beach ' and William Butler Yeats ' When You are Old . One poet reveres his union with

his beloved in the midst of chaos and uncertainties of the world while the other reflects on his unrequited love and imagines the remorse his beloved would feel in her old age at the rejection of her one and only true love

In the Victorian period , the Christian world with its theological dictates was shaken to the core by the radical scientific postulates . It is at this juncture the poet Matthew Arnold communicates his faith in the power of Love and personal conflict of belief versus doubt in his poem `Dover Beach . It is a reflection of the physical surroundings of the poet imbued with the deeper analysis of the loss of the concrete familiar structure of faith and a plea to his beloved to remain true to love , which he believed was the ultimate recourse for all humanity in future

Delving into the personal history of the poet , Arnold married Fanny Lucy Wightman at Dover , despite her father 's disapproval...