"Goodbye Blue Sky"

Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” 

I know I am a little late to the game for this poem, but since I was sick on Monday when we discussed it in class I thought I would point out something that intrigued me.

Starting with the first line, “the sea is calm tonight.” The speaker is asserting both a fact and  setting the scene, as well as the mood of the poem as a whole. The word “calm” in particular catches my eye, as it is often associated as both a positive state of mind and often precedes something bad suggested by the idiom “the calm before the storm.” The speaker here insists that the night is fair, but underneath the surface things are not all well. (Fine, yet not fine at all).

This tension is fully exposed in the last stanza when the speaker discusses “the eternal note of sadness” (14) from stanza one and explains it as an almost “constant uncertainty,” an oxymoron in itself, but still the truth.  The speaker then explains how all earthly beauty, however fragile or innocent it may be at times, is a façade concealing the  truly vicious reality of existence. “…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…” (29-34)  “Lie” is my favorite word in the poem both meaning the world is spread out in front of the speaker and audience as well as suggesting the non- factual nature of the world, driving home the theme of unrest beneath the surface within the poem.

Again I was not apart of the group discussion so if I have repeated or mutilated any points within the discussion I apologize.  In the interest of finding something original, while reading this poem I couldn’t help thinking about Arnold’s poem in reference to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”  in particular the song “Goodbye Blue Sky” (I hope it wasn’t the musical reference of the day)  The song discusses, in a way, similar themes as “Dover Beach” while also  mirroring  its structure, starting with calm ambient noises (birds chirping, the wind…) gradually sounds of airplanes start to overwhelm the sounds of nature and a child innocently points them out, “Look, mummy/ There's an airplane up in the sky.” The airplanes are supposedly German bombers in WWII, and the menacing reality of the scene is exposed. Both Arnold’s poem from the 1800’s and  Pink Floyd’s album released in 1979, while in reference to separate world altering events, are meant to exemplify the shattering of expectations or assumptions made in youth about the nature of life.

Here is a link to the song :    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58_S5e0AVU0