Comparing Dover Beach and Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Essay

A relation of the Victorian and Modernist Perceptions as Exemplified by capital of Delaware Beach and The Love vociferation of J. Alfred Prufrock Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot, in their respective poems, share a sense of alienation, not single from other people but from nature and idol as well. Arnold is opus in an age when the place of man in the universe is flood tide into question, for the first time since the advent of Christianity. He can no durable take the same solace in nature and the love of God that his Romantic predecessors did. While Arnold comments on isolation, however, he still addresses himself to a lover in Dover Beach, whereas Prufrock is presented as a man who has completely retreat within himself. Eliots isolation is total. In the industrialized age of Arnold, people no longer were able to look upon nature for inspiration the unpopulated rude of Wordsworths time was no longer accessible to a centralized people. The increase pace of life and urban crow ding obviated the Romantics luxury of reflection in natural solitude. While the poet observes nature in Dover Beach, the experience is metaphorically useful, but not an end unto itself, nor does it bring any comfort. Rather, Arnold uses the futility that he sees in the oceans tides to illustrate the fruitlessness of homo endeavor. Although the sea appears calm line 1, beneath the come up there is this almost cruel drama being played out, as the pebbles are dragged and flung by the waves and dragged back again, producing a grating roar. lines 9-12 The image of human beings as pebbles on the sand recurs in the third stanza, when Arnold refers to the Sea of doctrine which has withdrawn and left the rocks exposed as naked shingles. Eliot later overly repudiates t... ...he colloquial almost instantaneously. Arnolds final paragraph serves a sort of summing-up of Dover Beach as a whole. At the conclusion of Prufrock, Eliot leaps into an apparently irrelevant thought about mermaids. I ts not his job to explain what Prufrock is talking about. Eliot has glum the enigma of modern living into a poem, rather than using his range to provide an answer to the questions that humanity must deal with. Arnold seems to be lamentation for a time past when people could look to faith for answers to questions of import. Eliot acknowledges that those eld will never return and instead encourages the reader to apply a personal meaning to The Love birdcall of J. Alfred Prufrock. Works CitedT.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol. 2. ed. M. H. Abrams New York, London Norton, 1993.