The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me by Brendan Kennelly

Author:Brendan Kennelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Also in 1869 he published this five-line poem which might serve better as his poetic credo:

Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,

Of what we say we feel – below the stream,

As light, of what we think we feel – there flows

With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,

The central stream of what we feel indeed.

BK ‘Dover Beach’ moves from the image of a calm sea to that of a troubled land; from a ‘tranquil bay’ to a ‘darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night’. This movement is in four parts, from the ‘sweet’ tranquillity of Dover Beach to the confused, violent ignorance of clashing armies. First, the poem’s speaker invites his loved one to ‘Come to the window’ so that they may witness this striking scene, with the gleaming, transient light of the French coast and the glimmering, vast cliffs of England in the ‘fair’ moonlight, together. Yet it is at this very moment of loving togetherness that the sea, in eight eloquent lines, brings ‘The eternal note of sadness in’.

The second part of the poem’s movement begins with Sophocles, Arnold’s favourite Greek dramatist who heard in the rhythm of the Aegean sea ‘the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery’. This direct linking of the sea’s rhythms with the profound rhythms of human feelings is central to ‘Dover Beach’. It is a vital part of the poem’s resolution to confront the ‘eternal’.

The sadness deepens. The ebb and flow of human misery become more insistent. This leads into the third part of the poem’s movement. The Sea of Faith, once ‘full’ like the tide in the poem’s second line, and reassuringly wrapped like ‘a bright girdle, around the world, is now ‘Retreating’ from the hearts and minds, the souls of men and women, leaving a scene of epic spiritual desolation, stretching

down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

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