A poem by Robin Fulton Macpherson
Above Dover Beach
Behind convolvulus and seeding grass we park. We see not one scuff or rip on the Strait to show two thousand years and more of heavy use.
Southward across close-to-hand glitter and far-off mauve haze the other side if we believe our eyes is not
there, just as we if we believe our eyes are here in a universe with a homely sky and no looming non-universes to scare it.
Below, Waves arrange the shingle, each with a crisp cadence. The tide coming in balances the tide going out.
Robin Fulton Macpherson
Robin Fulton Macpherson writes: We had just got off the ferry from Calais and taken a small road up to the top of the cliffs west of Dover. Looking down, I couldn't help thinking of Matthew Arnold's shingle and the crisp waves were audible here away from the racket of the port. Arnold's poem about this beach is one of those famous pieces I feel sorry for: so many heavy plodding pedagogical boots have tramped over and round it. Also, like some other famous poems (Wordsworth's 'Daffodils' and Shelley's 'Ozymandias') it contains something illogical or impractical. If Arnold wanted to imagine the sea of faith drying up, the mere tidal movement of the sea along a shore is hardly appropriate. Did he forget for the moment that the tide comes in as well as goes out? Anyway, I see faith as something that is always there, but it rises and falls, advances and retreats, much like the sea being pulled and pushed by tidal forces. Another idea behind the poem has to do with obsolete pictures of the universe and our place in it. Scientists find out more and more, quite rightly, but that doesn't mean we should throw away the old models and forget about them. The Ptolemaic universe, for instance, served some of the best minds in Europe in their efforts to explore relations between God and man and between man and man, and these explorations are by no means out of date. It's not a crime to believe, now and then, just what the eyes see without chiding them for ignoring 'known facts'.
More poems by Robin Fulton Macpherson are available on the Scottish Poetry Library site.
