by Tom Stoppard
ON ‘DOVER BEACH’
HIMSELF: Perhaps if I were to say the poem … would that be the best way to begin? I’ll begin, then. ‘Dover Beach’.
‘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 –’
MATT (overlap): – and, Lord, how sweet it was!, in my twenty-ninth year, a published author and newly married, a poet and a husband in the first flush –
‘Ah, love, let us be true
To one another!’
Her father, the judge, made us wait – I would stand in Eaton Place watching the light in her window, urgent for her – but in June we were married, my darling Flu, my Frances Lucy Arnold at long last. We went to Dover, not for our wedding night, nor for our honeymoon, which we took later, in September, travelling – France, Switzerland, Italy – and by then we were familiars, Mr and Mrs Matthew Arnold and only slightly astonished; but in Dover, in our little bedroom looking on the bay, shyness and fear cancelled like a leaf torn from a calendar and the key to the long-forbidden gate kissed into my keeping, oh! the world was made new to the senses, and beautiful.
HIMSELF: ‘Only –’
MATT: Only? Ah, yes: only.
(The sound of surf on a shingle shore.)
‘Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land,
Listen! (Overlap.) You hear the grating roar –’
(The sound fades.)
MATT (overlap): Oh, yes, (in sync) the ‘grating roar’ of the tide on the shingles. I hear it.
HIMSELF: The poem turns like the tide on that ‘eternal note of sadness’. There is indeed no suggestion of happiness in that room where the poet stands by the window; quite the opposite: absolute despair.
MATT: You call my poem to bear witness against me?
HIMSELF: We must try to ‘see things as they are’.
MATT: And my prose, too! Then see the thing as it was. At Dover, with the moon shining on the bay, the poet hears – (The sound of the following.) – the small lapping and splashing from the washstand where his wife is making her toilet before retiring, and if he were to turn towards her – he knows this – the beauty of it would be like a blow. The sight alone of unfamiliar small clothes on the towel-horse ravels up the biology of his being. But he doesn’t turn. Far off – (The sound of surf.) – the surf is dragging on the shingle beach. The poet thinks of Sophocles long ago hearing that sound on the Aegean Sea and finding in it the ebb and flow of human misery: but for the poet himself, it is, rather, the sound, the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar – there is a poem in this! – of the Sea of Faith withdrawing from the world. Happy days!
HIMSELF: Withdrawing from the world which ‘hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor –!’
MATT: You find a contradiction? Heaven forbid that a husband’s delighting in his new-found land can’t bear a small contradiction like the world going down the drain.
HIMSELF: A drain would have been the better metaphor, but the contradiction I find is in the fact that you wrote the ending first, the peroration,
‘Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! –’
Where, then, did it come from, that apocalyptic despair?
MATT: Must it come from somewhere? Perhaps it was rhetorical despair –
HIMSELF: Are we going to be disingenuous?
MATT: – probably brought on by an unhealthy self-absorption I took with me to Dover like a touch of food-poisoning, the ungratified sense that I belonged to a lost age of great natures and the best writing: oh, the gulf between what I wished to write and what I had to show! My first little book of poems had come and gone like a mayfly: I myself began to despise it the moment it was in my hands. When I met Miss Wightman, the judge’s daughter of Eaton Place, I was private secretary to a lord at two hundred pounds a year, and a poet only by the condescension of a few booksellers and the goodwill of friends and family. Tennyson was made Laureate just then, and brought out ‘In Memoriam’. I didn’t think much of it, still don’t: no architectural form, there’s really no need for it ever to stop. I never thought Tennyson would finally stand high. He didn’t come to my funeral, either.
HIMSELF: He sent a wreath.
MATT: Huh.
HIMSELF: Browning was there. And Henry James.
MATT: Well, never mind him; but Tennyson and Browning each lack what the other has in abundance: intellectual vigour and poetic sensibility. In the fusion of the two, I, perhaps, have more than either, and I had more of the modern, you see, so I expected to have my turn with the public as they had theirs.
HIMSELF: ‘Dover Beach’ is known and loved wherever English verse is read.
MATT: Well, no one took the slightest notice of it at the time.
HIMSELF: Even so. It’s considered to be your masterpiece.
MATT: My masterpiece! A lyric! – A single leaf in my bumper Collected? What about ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’? What about ‘Sohrab and Rustum’?
HIMSELF: Oh, certainly not forgotten, especially by examination boards.
MATT: What about my tragedy?
HIMSELF: Ah, yes, Merope.
MATT: Never performed. Never read.
HIMSELF: Never heard of.
MATT: If this is posterity, I don’t like it. ‘Dover Beach’ of all things!
HIMSELF: And yet, it was particular for you, evidently you kept it out of your next book and the two books after … and it was sixteen years before ‘Dover Beach’ slipped into public view.
MATT: It was time for an inventory. I was forty-five and I wanted a rest from poetry. I was in demand for my articles, and I was working all hours of the week on school inspections. I lived on the railways …
HIMSELF: But that is not to the point.
MATT: Oh – ‘Dover Beach’! I don’t know, perhaps I undervalued it.
HIMSELF: The thing as it was, Matt!
MATT: To me, the end of hope and goodness, and the bleak last vision of mankind striking blindly at one another on a battlefield, tends towards an elevation, a sanctification of the love between two people. If, on the other hand, one reads in too literal a frame, if one is not, as it were, attuned to the emotional heightening that is second nature to poetry, for example if one misses the allusion to Thucydides’ description of the night battle of Epipolae in the Peloponnesian Wars, then one might be left with an impression that the poem –
(Flu is faintly heard, sobbing.)
– renders marriage and its many satisfactions, including social, utterly futile; from which position –
(Flu sobs inconsolably.)
– the indignant reader might wonder, with only a small break in her logic, why the poet bothered to get married at all.
(Flu sobs wretchedly, leaving, and the door slams behind her.)
HIMSELF: Matt?
MATT: My poetry is depreciated as ‘academic’, a tarbrush as easily applied to my critical essays, since I’m told they share the viewpoint of Oxford’s dreaming spires, only supposing them to be made of solid ivory – this after I wore myself out over thirty-five years as an inspector of elementary schools in an effort to prepare even the lowest and littlest in the land for the best that has been written and thought.
(A schoolroom of children comes to their feet.)
Well, my little man, and how do you spell dog?
CHILD: Please, sir, d-o-g.
MATT: Capital. Very good indeed. I couldn’t do it better myself. And now, children, let us go a little further and see if we can spell cat. chorus: C-a-t!
MATT: Now this is really excellent.
(The schoolroom atmosphere cuts out.)
Teach them letters, teach them grammar, and then you can teach them joy,
without which schooling is drudgery to make drudges. Take them for nature walks before you give them nature poetry, and you make them bumpkins; give them religion before you give them poetry, and you make them heathens. The mind of a poet – a great poet – creates the culture that religion only serves to remind us of and hold us to: sweet reason and noble conduct. The Church, when it knows its business, is a society for the promotion of goodness. When the Church forgets its business, and promotes miracles, mysticism and general camel-swallowing, it removes itself from ordinary lives. Faith retreats, anarchy encroaches. Everything I ever wrote or did was of a piece: anarchy is the enemy of culture; faith is the fortress against anarchy. And, Christ Jesu, I stuck it out when many would have recanted three times over. Our youngest did not live a year and a half. I sat up with him reading examination papers, and every second paper I came to him and kissed his soft little cheek. The undertaker’s assistant carried the coffin on his shoulder like a toy-box, and we walked behind in the sleeting rain.
(A funeral bell is heard.)
It was January. In November we buried his brother next to him. Flu had nursed the boy for all his sixteen years. He was the occupation of her life. On the last day I sat with him trying to revise my preface to Culture and Anarchy. Four years on, a third brother; three sons lost of our six children, three of our four boys. That Flu stayed sane was heroism. It was only with the death of little Basil, and again with Tommy, and again with Budge, that the lines I wrote in Dover found their occasion.
‘Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams …’
(Funeral bell fades.)
Oh, sweetness and light!, against ugliness and ignorance; the best that has been written and thought, spread as widely as it will go! – I fought almost alone at the forefront and am called nostalgic and elitist. I am delivered to posterity as a culture snob.
HIMSELF: Well, of course you are, Matt; so would anybody who thinks anything old must be better than anything new, and anything written in a foreign language must be better than anything written in English apart from Shakespeare.
MATT: Did I ever say that? No! I may have said that Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe were better than Coventry Patmore.
HIMSELF: Or Dryden – or Pope.
MATT: Well, obviously Dryden and Pope. And Byron.
HIMSELF: And Keats.
MATT: Keats had a multitudinous gift for memorable phrases but not an idea in his curly head. My nightingale poem, ‘Hark! ah, the nightingale – The tawny-throated! Hark! –’
HIMSELF (overlap): I know how it goes.
MATT: Well, my ‘Philomela’ sings in posterity’s deepest dungeon.
HIMSELF: Poor Matt! You were never born to be a poet except for one sublime moment in Dover when the good Lord paid you in advance and you hit the spot with a lyric that bobs up like a cork whatever anyone throws at it – the hackneyed recourse to sea and moon, the vagueness of whatever point it doesn’t quite make, the name-dangling of famous dead Athenians, the metaphor problem –
MATT: The what?
HIMSELF: The problem of the tide, Matt. Tides don’t just go out, they invariably come back in. Give it twelve hours, the Sea of Faith will be banging up against those glimmering cliffs, and the world will be right as a trivet again.
MATT: But my metaphor – my celebrated metaphor – was of the tide going out, not in!
HIMSELF: And the other problem, that there’s no tide in the Aegean anyway, so whatever sound Sophocles heard it’s unlikely to have been –
MATT: This is not criticism, it’s oceanography!
HIMSELF: Whatever criticism is or isn’t, and whether or not your thousands of words on ‘the function of criticism’ can help you now, ‘Dover Beach’ has escaped into the sweet night air –
(The sound of the surf.)
– where its melancholy cadence and wistful promise of desolation find a perfect sympathy in the world of things as they are. Happy days, Matt!
(The sound of the surf rises, and is then modulated through the poem.)
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-blanch’d 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 furl’d.
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.
About the Author
Tom Stoppard’s work includes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, After Magritte, Dirty Linen, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink, The Invention of Love, the trilogy The Coast of Utopia and Rock ’n’ Roll. His radio plays include If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank, Albert’s Bridge, Where Are They Now?, Artist Descending a Staircase, The Dog It Was That Died and In the Native State. Television work includes Professional Foul, Squaring the Circle and Parade’s End. His film credits include Empire of the Sun, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which he also directed, Shakespeare in Love, Enigma and Anna Karenina.
Also by Tom Stoppard
TOM STOPPARD: PLAYS ONE
The Real Inspector Hound, After Magritte, Dirty Linen,
New-Found-Land, Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth
TOM STOPPARD: PLAYS TWO
The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, ‘M’ is for Moon among
Other Things, If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank, Albert’s Bridge,
Where Are They Now?, Artist Descending a Staircase,
The Dog it Was That Died, In the Native State, On ‘Dover Beach’
TOM STOPPARD: PLAYS THREE
A Separate Peace, Teeth, Another Moon Called Earth,
Neutral Ground, Professional Foul, Squaring the Circle
TOM STOPPARD: PLAYS FOUR
Dalliance (after Schnitzler), Undiscovered Country (after Schnitzler),
Rough Crossing (after Molnár), On the Razzle (after Nestroy),
The Seagull (after Chekhov)
TOM STOPPARD: PLAYS FIVE
Arcadia, The Real Thing, Night and Day, Indian Ink, Hapgood
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD
TRAVESTIES
JUMPERS
THE INVENTION OF LOVE
THE COAST OF UTOPIA
(Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage)
ROCK ’N’ ROLL
adaptatio
ns and translations
HENRY IV (after Pirandello)
HEROES (after Sibleyras)
IVANOV (after Chekhov)
THE CHERRY ORCHARD (after Chekhov)
screenplays
SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (with Marc Norman)
PARADE’S END
(based on the novel by Ford Madox Ford)
fiction
LORD MALQUIST AND MR MOON
Copyright
This collection first published in 1990 as Stoppard: The Plays for Radio 1964–1983
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2012
New edition, as Stoppard: The Plays for Radio 1964–1991