One hundred and fifty-six years ago, the British poet Matthew Arnold composed a profound poem, Dover Beach. Since that night of his musing on the English Channel, while he pondered, wistfully, the pounding of moonlit surf upon the sands beneath Albion's ghostly white cliffs, the poem has been read and pondered by thousands, yeah millions, of poetic souls.
I am one of them.
Matthew's musing has inspired me on many reading occasions, over, lo, these many years of my time on this earth. This afternoon I took the liberty of poetic license to expound upon Matthew's original inspiration by composing a tome of my own, reflecting upon the world as it is now, in 2023. I hope you don't mind my borrowing from the long-dead poet, to compose a few contemporary verses augmenting his original vision. . . and extending it to the world as we experience it now. This represents a kind of borrowing that poets have been doing for many centuries, even millennia of time.
The Web is mad tonight.
The hype is full, the moods’ unfair
Upon our minds, in the worldwide fright.
Glee is gone; the broken barricades unmanned.
Blunderous ballast, out in the festering froth.
Come out of it; sweet is the salt-sea air!
Away, away from the wired strands that fray
Where the Web wrings our love-lost time.
Listen! we hear the swishing song
Of waves which the seas draw out, and fling back
As they return, upon this glistening strand.
They begin, and cease, and begin again, out here . . .
While inside, the worldwide web writhes to bring
The latest shriek of madness in.
John of old, long ago
foresaw this in the Patmos, and it brought
into his spirit the turbid ebb and flow
of human destiny; we
discern, in the swish, a similar vision
As he was seeing it o’er that distant Aegean Sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, all across our earthen shores
Unrolling like His rolls of scroll unfurled.
But now I only hear
His burdensome long, prophetic roar
Retreating, from the Net
Far from the mad’ning Cloud, o’er the vast froths of fear
And naked urls of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
Strung out between us like a web of dreams,
So various, so scatterous, so desperate
Hath really neither sense, nor joy, nor faith,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for hope
And we are here, in some spy-strung scope
Are swept with urgent signals of struggle and flight
Where strung-out denizens surf by night.
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