Dover Beach

Describe the situation, and discuss what the speaker says (and HOW he says it) to his beloved about faith and love.

The speaker is looking out the window at the view. He beckons another to join him, a lover. The speaker isn’t so much admiring the view as he is observing it and wishing to share it with this lover. It seemed peaceful and nice at first, “The sea is calm tonight,//The tide is full, the moon lies fair//Upon the straits” The further we get, the more agitated the ocean seems to become. “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” This could be a comment on the repetition of life or the constant back and forth arguments of things, such as faith and love versus science. Faith, the speaker suggests, is crumpled and collected in a confusing state, though it was previously spread out and open, easy to make sense of. “The Sea of Faith//Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore//Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.” He fears faith is leaving, or he himself is losing it, which is a statement on the times as faith was a big question as science was explaining more and more, changing the way people think and causing greater questions.

“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.”

Love, the speaker has greater belief and hope in. He wants to at least. He begs his lover, “let us be true//to one another!” because he has no faith in anything outside of love. The speaker doesn’t trust the world and feels he can only trust in himself and his lover, but only if she did the same.

“For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath neither joy, nor love, not light,
Nor certitude, not peace, nor help for pain”

They are alone with each other, which harkens back to the Marquerite poems with the feeling of isolation. “And we are here as on a darkling plain//Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,//Where ignorant armies clash by night”

Arnold has a excellent grasp of the age! There's no denying that. His writing I felt had a sort of realness, something that I thought Wordsworth also had and I personally liked.

Good connection to the speaker in the "Marguerite" poems--again, maybe "reduced" Byrons?
Certainly! Arnold's speakers are less bad and put on the front of not being stoic with their great love. They are not as much self-outcasted as they are self-isolated, but instead of doing it because of judging society or some past hurt or whatever reasoning a Byronic hero might use, they have lost faith in anything but their love.

As a love poem: how would you feel if a guy addressed you like this?
I do feel can be a love poem. He wants to trust her and have her trust in him, each other being the only thing they can depend on. If a guy said that to me though, I'd feel incredibly overwhelmed. He basically says that the world sucks, so we can only trust in each other. That's extremely pessimistic and needy.