what does this poem mean?

Question

ah,friend let us be true
to on 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 clash by night
-matthew arnold
from the book of friendship


thanks

this is just the part my teacher gave me, and no im not got or emo its for a essay that was assigned i didnt chose this lol

Answer 1

That not the whole poem. That's just the last few lines (and not even a completely accurate version of those lines). Here's a link to the whole poem, "Dover Beach":

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/writings/doverbeach.html

The speaker in the poem is addressing not just a friend, but a lover. He seems to be telling her that there is something deeply sad about life in this world, and that love is the only remedy for that sadness. That's how I read it, anyway. What do you think?

Answer 2

Classmate's 100% right.

The lines you quoted contain Arnold's famous statement of late nineteenth-century pessimism. He's writing about how the beauty of Dover Beach at night -- how all beauty in the world -- is just a momentary illusion.

In reality, the world has no joy, love, light, certitude, nor help for pain. It's just a nightmare realm of confusion and struggle. (At a certain point, Matthew Arnold renounced some of his early poet because he decided it was too full of pessimism and despair.)

So ... if we can't have any faith in the world, then maybe our only strategy is to create a world of love, of two people dedicated to each other.

Very Goth, Matthew Arnold, very emo.