Disappearance of God and Dover Beach

In his essay, "The Disappearance of God," J. Hillis Miller argues how beginning with the dawn of the Victorian age, there was an ever-present sense that God was no longer everywhere, but instead God was now out there, somewhere. Miller articulates that no one thing can account for God's disappearance, but articulates that that "this whole set of changes, both material and spiritual happened, more or less simultaneously, like a great wave breaking on the shore" (Miller 4). He also notes how God's disappearance no doubt caused a drastic change in the literature. After Victoria's ascent to the throne, the literature started reflecting God's absence rather than talking about his total existence in everything. Miller says, "In baroque poetry we can witness the crucial moment of the change from a poetry of presence to a poetry allusion and absence" (Miller 7). By the nineteenth century the starting place for a writer was likely to be the isolation and destitution like that found in Mathew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach." Through its governing conceit of the sea and the symbolism of both Dover Beach and the cliffs of England, Arnold's "Dover Beach" conveys a bleak image of existence, illustrating J. Hillis Miller's argument about the mood of doubt that characterized Victorian England and demonstrating how both God and faith are disappearing like a receding sea.

According to Miller prior to the Victorian Era, for many writers there was an intuition of nature as inhabited by God, however, with the turn of the nineteenth century, writers, like Arnold, no longer portrayed God as both transcendent and imminent. In the first stanza of "Dover Beach" Arnold writes, "the cliffs of England stand/ glimmering and vast..." The cliffs he refers too are both startling and stark and invoke a metaphor for all existence that everything is being perceived as threatened (Arnold 2090). He titles the poem "Dover Beach," Dover being a symbol and emblem of England, and in doing so Arnold causes this whole problem of existence to encompass all of England.

The sea is the matrix around which this entire poem is built. The sea is multivalent as it first conveys the enumerable Dove, but very suddenly it is signifying more than just a sea, but rather the sea of faith. Arnold very brilliantly transitions from a literal sea to a sea of being the Sea of Faith, which