Dover Beach

It's the idea of love.

This just makes me think of Dover Beach and the Matthew

Arnold poem, right? And that's basically what she's saying.

Like, let us be true to one another.

Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.

Yeah, it's another one of her classical illusions.

Yeah, but it also reminds me of Dover Beach with the ignorant armies clashing by night.

Yeah, certainly ignorant armies there.

Then hush, thou boisterous bugle-peal!

the wild boar rustles in his lair the fierce hounds snuff the tainted air but lorran hounds keep rooted there cheer cheer thy dogs into the brake o hunter and without a fear thy golden tasseled bugle blow and through the glades thy pastime take for thou wilt rouse no sleepers here for those thou seest are unmoved cold cold as those who lived and loved a thousand years ago part two part three of tristram and isolt by matthew arnold part three isolt of brittany a year had flown and o'er the sea away in cornwall tristram and queen isolt lay in king mark's chapel in tintagel old there in a ship they bore those lovers cold the young surviving isolt one bright day had wandered forth her children were at play in a green circular hollow in the heath which borders the sea-shore a country path creeps over it from the tilled fields behind the hollow's grassy banks are soft inclined and to one standing on them far and near the lone unbroken view spreads bright and clear over the waste this cirque of open ground is light and green the heather which all round creeps thickly grows not here but the pale grass is strewn with rocks and many a shivered mass of veined white gleaming quartz and here and there dotted with holly trees and juniper in the smooth centre of the opening stood three hollies side by side and made a screen warm with the winter sun of burnished green with scarlet berries gemmed the fell fair's food under the glittering hollies isault stands watching her children play their little hands are busy gathering spars of quartz and streams of staxhorn for their hats anon with screams of mad delight they drop their spoils and bound among the holly clumps and broken ground racing full speed and startling in their rush the fell fairs and the speckled mistlethrush out of their glossy coverts but when now their cheeks were flushed and over each hot brow under the feathered hats of the sweet pair in blinding masses showered the golden hair then isolt called them to her and the three clustered under the holly screen and she told them an old-world breton history warm in their mantles wrapped the three stood there under the hollies in the clear still air mantles with those rich furs deep glistening which venice ships do from swart egypt bring long they stayed still then pacing at their ease moved up and down under the glossy trees but still as they pursued their warm dry road from izolt's lips the unbroken story flowed and still the children listened their blue eyes fixed on their mother's face in wide surprise nor did their looks stray once to the sea-side nor to the brown heaths round them bright and wide nor to the snow which though twas all away from the open heath still by the hedgerows lay nor to the shining sea-fowl that with screams bore up from where the bright atlantic gleams swooping to landward nor to where quite clear the fell fairs settled on the thickets near and they would still have listened till dark night came keen and chill down on the heather bright but when the red glow on the sea grew cold and the grey turrets of the castle old looked sternly through the frosty evening air then izolt took by the hand those children fair and brought her tale to an end and found the path and led them home over the darkening and is she happy does she see unmoved the days in which she might have lived and loved slip without bringing bliss slowly away one after one tomorrow like to-day joy has not found her yet nor ever will is it this thought which makes her mean so still her features so fatigued her eyes though sweet so sunk so rarely lifted save to meet her children's she moves slow her voice alone hath yet an infantine and silver tone but even that comes languidly in truth she seems one dying in a mask of youth and now she will go home and softly lay her laughing children in their beds and play awhile with them before they sleep and then she'll light her silver lamp which fishermen dragging their nets through the rough waves afar along this iron coast know like a star and take her broidery frame and there she'll sit hour after hour her gold curls sweeping it lifting her soft bent head only to mind her children or to listen to the wind and when the clock peals midnight she will move her work away and let her fingers rove across the shaggy brows of tristram's hound who lies guarding her feet along the ground or else she will fall musing her blue eyes fixed her slight hands clasped on her lap then rise and at her prie-dieu kneel until she have told her rosary beads of ebony tipped with gold then to her soft sleep and to-morrow will be to-day's exact repeated effigy yes it is lonely for her in her hall the children and the grey-hailed seneschal her women and sir tristram's aged hound are there the sole companions to be found but these she loves and noisier life than this she would find ill to bear weak as she is she has her children too and night and day is with them and the wide heaths where they play the hollies and the cliffs and the sea-shore the sand the sea-birds and the distant sails these are to her dear as to them the tales with which this day the children she beguiled she gleaned from breton grandams when a child in every hut along the sea-coast wild she herself loves them still and when they are told can forget all to hear them as of old dear saints it is not sorrow as i hear not suffering which shuts up eye and ear to all that has delighted them before and lets us be what we were once no more no we may suffer deeply yet retain power to be moved and soothed for all our pain by what of old pleased us and will again no tis the gradual furnace of the world in whose hot air our spirits are upcurled until they crumble or else grow like steel which kills in us the bloom the youth the spring which leaves the fierce necessity to feel but takes away the power this can avail by drying up our joy in everything to make our former pleasures all seem stale this or some tyrannous single thought some fit of passion which subdues our souls to it till for its sake alone we live and move call it ambition or remorse or love this too can change us wholly and make seem all which we did before shadow and dream and yet i swear it angers me to see how this full passion gulls men potently being in truth but a diseased unrest and an unnatural overheat at best how they are full of languor and distress not having it which when they do possess they straightway are burnt up with fume and care and spend their lives in posting here and there where this plague drives them and have little ease are furious with themselves and hard to please like that bald caesar the famed roman wight who wept at reading of a grecian knight who made a name at younger years than he or that renowned mirror of chivalry prince alexander philip's peerless son who carried the great war from macedon into the sudan's realm and thundered on to die at thirty-five in babylon what tale did isolt to the children say under the hollies that bright winter day she told them of the fairy-haunted land away the other side of brittany beyond the heaths edged by the lonely sea of the deep forest glades of brose liande through whose green boughs the golden sunshine creeps where merlin by the enchanted thorn-tree sleeps for here he came with the fay vivian one april when the warm days first began he was on foot and that false fay his friend on her white palfrey here he met his end in these lone sylvan glades that april day this tale of merlin and the lovely fay was the one isolt chose and she brought clear before the children's fancy him and her blowing between the stems the forest air had loosened the brown locks of vivian's hair which played on her flushed cheek and her blue eyes sparkled with mocking glee and exercise her palfrey's flanks were mired and bathed in sweat for they had travelled far and not stopped yet a briar in that tangled wilderness had scored her white right hand which she allows to rest ungloved on her green riding dress the other warded off the drooping boughs but still she chatted on with her blue eyes fixed full on merlin's face her stately prize her havier had the morning's fresh clear grace the spirit of the woods was in her face she looked so witching fair that learned wight forgot his craft and his best wits took flight and he grew fond and eager to obey his mistress use her empire as she may they came to where the brushwood ceased and day peered twixt the stems and the ground broke away in a slope swore down to a brawling brook and up as high as where they stood to look on the brook's farther side was clear but then the underwood and trees began again this open glen was studded thick with thorns then white with blossom and you saw the horns through last year's fern of the shy fallow deer who come at noon down to the water here you saw the bright-eyed squirrels dart along under the thorns on the green sward and strong the blackbird whistled from the dingles near and the weird chirping of the woodpecker rang lonely and sharp the sky was fair and a fresh breath of spring stirred everywhere merlin and vivian stopped on the slope's brow to gaze on the light sea of leaf and bough which glistering plays all round them lone and mild as if to itself the quiet forest smiled upon the brow-top grew a thorn and here the grass was dry and mossed and you saw clear across the hollow white anemones starred the cool turf and clumps of primroses ran out from the dark underwood behind no fairer resting-place a man could find here let us halt said merlin then and she nodded and tied her palfrey to a tree they sate them down together and asleep fell upon merlin more like death so deep her finger on her lip then vivian rose and from her brown-locked head the wimple throws and takes it in her hand and waves it over the blossom thorn-tree and her sleeping lover nine times she waved the fluttering wimple round and made a little plot of magic ground and in that daisied circle as men say is merlin prisoner till the judgment day but she herself whither she will can rove for she was passing weary of his love End of Part 3 Read by Alan Mapstone in Oxford, England Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold Read for LibriVox.org by Alan Mapstone 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 blanched land listen you hear the grating roar of pebbles which the waves draw back and fling at their return up the high strand begin and cease and then again begin with tremulous cadence slow and bring the eternal note of sadness in sophocles 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 the sea of faith was once too at the full and round earth's shore lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled but now i only hear its melancholy long withdrawing roar retreating to the breath of the night wind down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world ah love let us be true to one another for the world which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams so various so beautiful so new hath really neither joy nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.

And we are here as on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.

Thursis by Matthew Arnold.

The tragedy of the Church of England, and it is a tragedy, is that we have seldom been in greater need of spiritual and moral leadership.

As Matthew Arnold's famous Dover Beach quote, No, I don't know what that's about.

I'll leave it there.

So that gives you a picture, it certainly gave me one, of where, if England is going to go down that lane, considering what England has been responsible for in the right way over a thousand years, where are the rest of us going?