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. (Lines 21-28)

In this dramatic poem, the speaker starts off describing the night—it's calm, and he can see the sea and the cliffs. He starts talking to whomever he's with ("Come to the window"). It's here that things take a turn for the melancholic.

Crisis at the Beach

Some people get romantic about the sea. Not this guy. Although we don't know what's behind the crisis, it's interesting that this dude is having it at the beach, where philosophers have had Deep Thoughts for thousands of years (and where we might be especially impressed by nature). But first he just gets sad. We've got a real sea out that window, but instead we're hearing about the "Sea of Faith." And this sea isn't blue and glittering and happy. Nope, it's "retreating" down the "naked shingles of the world." It's the Crisis of Faith Sea.

Imagine going on vacation to the beach and finding that the ocean isn't really an ocean, but just an analogy for how we're alone in a violent world. Well, that's pretty much what happens to Arnold's speaker. Bon voyage.

For Victorians, losing faith in God meant losing faith in everything you ever knew. Suddenly the world started to seem meaningless, dangerous, and ugly. They ask: if biology is the only purpose of life, then what's the point of living? It's a question we're still grappling with today.

So why ruin a perfectly nice and potentially romantic night? This poem takes a dramatic moment and lets the character talk himself through it. The dramatic monologue was a freshly minted poetic form in the Victorian era, and this has some key elements of the form: we have a speaker periodically addressing some other character, but the point seems to be that the speaker is confessing or revealing something. It's almost like a poetic talking cure.

In fact, if you read this poem aloud, you get a better sense of its rhythm. The lines vary from three to five feet, almost like the ebb and flow of the waves (check out line 26: it's short, and it starts with "retreating"). It's as though Arnold wants us to hear the waves and have that rhythmic anchor even as we get the bad news: "[W]e are here as on a darkling plain /Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, /Where ignorant armies clash by night" (Lines 35-37).