On Dover Beach

Anthony Cheetham from Highfields School, Wolverhampton has offered this poem to use with AS/A level students when studying coasts.

Dover Beach  By : Matthew Arnold (1822-88)

The sea is calm to-night
The tide is full, the moon lies fair 
Upon the straits;-on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, 
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. 
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! 
Only, from the long line of spray 
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land, 
Listen! You hear the grating roar 
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, 
At there return, up the high strand, 
Begin, and cease, and then again begin, 
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring 
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago 
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought 
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow 
Of human misery; we 
Find also in the sound a thought 
Hearing it by this distant northern sea

Download the lesson notes

The poem and notes are available as a word document.

Noel Jenkins' students from Hampstead School in London have ventured north to Wales and Liverpool for A level fieldwork. While in Liverpool, they were inspired to write some poems! A good selection of these are published on their website.

Fourteen new poems to mark National Poetry Day commissioned by Andrew Motion on the theme of the Wind Rose.  All with geographical titles.  My favourite is North West by Carol-Ann Duffy  because I love Liverpool and I too have had these feelings. 

This poem makes me cry and shows the human tragedy

Whether to cry out in answer to

My father’s strangled cries

As he shifts bricks above my head,

Or whether to keep silent, holding back

This dust with clamped lips. I lie

Sealed in the cannot choose.

If I speak, death will steal my breath,

Seeping in at the mouth;

If I choose silence he may go away

And weep, and never know how close

My grave, how I longed to answer.

Someone flutes power from my face.

I feel warm breath. My eyelids move:

Their flutter fill my eyes with grit.

Weight lifts from chest and arms

And inch by inch I live again.

In my father’s arms

I cannot find strength to haul up

Words from my darkness.

Angela Topping

Source Can you hear? Publisher Piper 1992

This poem from a student in Singapore is our poem of the month. Could you draw some diagrams to illustrate it?

Waves - a Poem

You spill as you roll regularly
gently up the slope
with your long wavelength
but low crest
your swash greatly exceeds
that of your backwash
You plunge as you climb rapidly
steeply up the slope
with your short wavelength
but high crest
your backwash greatly exceeds
that of your swash
You converge on headlands
but diverge in bays
you zig-zag your way
in longshore drift
as you sort out sands and shingles
along the bay
In a constructive mood
you build up ridges in bars and dunes
along a regular coast
but as you pass a curve
you spit out and enclose a lagoon
or reach out to other islands with a tombolo
You can be destructive
as you undercut a cliff
breaking with your sheer weight
hurling and dissolving stones
til it collapses on its sides
sprawling as a benched platform
You let it succumb to notches
before carving out caves and geos
and gushing out blow-holes
Alas the gaps meet to
arch its way before abandoning a stack
and finally remains a solitary stump

Contributed by Azizan Duana

www.geography.com.sg/coasts/poem-waves.html