Technical Qualities, Symbolism, and Imagery of "Dover Beach"In "Dover Beach," Matthew Arnold creates a dramatic Victorian-era monologue that shows how perceptions can be misleading. Arnold conveys the theme of "Dover Beach" through three essential developments: the technical qualities of the poem itself, the symbolism, and the imagery. The theme of illusion versus reality in "Dover Beach" reflects the speaker's awareness of the incompatibility between what is perceived and what is truly real. The technical qualities of poetry include rhythm and meter, rhyme, figures of speech, sound, and the irony of the words. Mechanisms alone do not explain why illusion and reality differ, but they help explain how Arnold sets up the poem to support the theme. The most important mechanisms include the rhythm and meter of the poem's lines and stanzas. Line 1 is an iambic trimeter: The sea/is calm/tonight. The gentle pulsating rhythm of the iamb mirrors the ebb and flow of the sea. The words of the first line manifest this idea of ​​imagining a calm sea gently lapping the beach. The second line, an iambic tetramater, also reveals a calm sea. However, line 3 breaks the pattern and forces the reader to break their own rhythm. Line 3 includes: On/on the strait,//on/the French coast/the light. The line begins and ends with an iamb, but the middle part is interrupted by an anapest. The anapesto is a harbinger of future turmoil. The fourth verse breaks even more with an anapest at the beginning, but the fifth verse picks up the pace. Shimmering/and vast//out/in/tran/quil bay. The rhythm picks up at the end of the first verse, but the original trimeter does not. The number of feet per line... half the paper... the speaker is supported by rhythm and meter, the lack of a coherent rhyme scheme, figures of speech, the sound of words, and the irony of entire poem. The symbolism of the sea and the imagery of light and dark highlight the alternating visual and auditory qualities, which process illusion and reality respectively, Arnold's depiction of a person's battle with illusion and reality shows a complex vision of humanity in a simple poem.Works CitedArnold, Matthew. "Dover Beach." [1867] Literature. 5th ed. Eds.James H. Pickering and Jeffery D. Hoeper. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice, 1997. 952-53.Ciardi, John. What does a poem mean? Boston: Houghton, 1975. 196. Untermeyer, Louis. The search for poetry. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969. 57-59. Walcutt, Charles Child. The explainer. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968. 16-9.