Dover Beach: Beauty Hides Pain Poet, Matthew Arnold, presents a very real theme of love in his poem, Dover Beach. Where he creates a scene of beauty among the sea and shores, mixed with night and moonlight, he also is presenting us with the underlying misery, which is easily over looked and disregarded. Arnold writes, really, of love and loss, and relates it to beauty with hidden misery. The first stanza of the poem paints …showed first 75 words of 1363 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1363 total…the uncertainty of life, the sadness of life, and the mystery of life. But, at the same time, in reading Dover Beach one recognizes the beauty that the world is capable of, the love that people are capable of, and most importantly that with out these ironic opposites, the world would not be capable of progressing in to each of these things, and we as people would not feel the extravagant emotions that we do.