The Dover Bitch: The Dover Bitch
The Dover Bitch
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The Poem
In “Dover Beach” (1867), one of the most frequently anthologized texts in all of English literature, Matthew
Arnold created a monument to Victorian angst over cosmic instability and the erosion of faith. Standing by
the shore at the southern edge of England, the poet, bemoaning post-Darwinian doubt, turns to the woman
beside him and proclaims that the only consolation and certainty remaining in a violent, desolate universe is
their love for each other.
In “The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life,” Anthony Hecht offers an irreverent but resonant sequel to the
familiar Arnold poem. The unnamed narrator of Hecht’s revision presents himself as a straight-talking
acquaintance of the bombastic Arnold. Offering a dramatically different reading of the situation in “Dover
Beach,” he suggests that the beloved woman on whom the poet counts as the last bastion of constancy is in
truth vulgar and unfaithful. He even admits to occasional casual sexual trysts with her.
In appropriating Arnold’s high-minded poem to the sensibilities of a smart aleck, Hecht is offering a comic
lesson in narrative perspective, a reminder that, however authoritative the proclamations in “Dover Beach”
appear, there are alternatives to the way its speaker sees the world. The woman addressed in Arnold’s poem
is treated as part of the theatrical scenery, not as a sovereign consciousness with thoughts and feelings of her
own. Hecht’s speaker, however, is most intent on trying to represent her point of view. Reducing Arnold to a
literary prop, he attempts to characterize her reactions to the Victorian poet’s ardent rhetoric during their
night at Dover Beach. Hecht’s speaker claims that, far from being enamored of Arnold or inspired by his
grandiose speech, she had more mundane matters on her mind, like what his whiskers might feel like against
her skin. “The Dover Bitch” explains that she became angry at Arnold for ignoring her as a living, sensual
woman and for using her as a mere pretext for his florid oratory.
“Dover Beach” is a monument to the “high seriousness” that, in an 1880 book called The Study of Poetry,
Arnold extolled as a criterion for great poetry. Hecht’s revision is an exercise in drollery. In contrast to the
studied formality of “Dover Beach,” written in four stanzas of carefully organized blank verse, “The Dover
Bitch” is composed in a single twenty-nine-line stanza of free verse that simulates the nonchalance of
vernacular speech. Like a casual conversation, the run-on lines seem to ramble, and instead of concluding the
poem merely halts.
Forms and Devices
“So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl,” begins the anonymous speaker of “The Dover Bitch,” a
cheeky man who does not himself pretend to “poetry” but addresses the reader bluntly in the unadorned
English of the streets, a language ostensibly so frank that it does not shy away from the tactless word “bitch.”
The speaker’s consistent preference for colloquial over fancy language reinforces his claim to be a candid
alternative to Arnold’s specious magniloquence. Filled with casual utterances such as the expletives “so” and
“well now” and the contractions “I’ll,” “it’s,” and “mustn’t,” Hecht’s speaker offers the illusion of
verbal spontaneity—and thus sincerity—in contrast to the evasiveness of Arnold’s meticulously contrived
clauses.
The Dover Bitch
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The Dover Bitch: The Dover Bitch
The speaker’s apparent ability to summarize all of Arnold’s elegant words in barely three lines is an implicit
attack on the older poet’s verbosity: “Try to be true to me,/ And I’ll do the same for you, for things are bad/
All over, etc., etc.” is presumably what Arnold would have said had he shared this speaker’s honesty and his
knack for getting directly to the point. The “etc., etc.” is devastating ridicule of “Dover Beach” for being
redundant, as if one need not pay much attention to exactly what Arnold is saying beyond his banal
affirmation of faithful love in a treacherous world.
The subsequent account of the woman’s reactions to Arnold remains colloquial and sassy, suggesting that she
shares the speaker’s impatience with Arnold’s decorous, evasive oratory. Repetition of the sloppy, slangy
intensifier “really” (“really felt sad,” “really angry,” “really tough”) distances her further from Arnold the
fastidious stylist. The line that informs readers of her resentment at being addressed “As sort of a mournful
cosmic last resort”—another comic reduction of Arnold’s elegant poetry—is abruptly and comically followed
by the judgment that this “Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty”—an assertion in very simple English
of very simple truths that Arnold’s exquisite proclamations seem to ignore. The woman deploys a vocabulary
including “one or two unprintable things,” obscenities that are inconceivable within Arnold’s chaste and
earnest poem. The speaker seems, again, to suggest that there is a greater honesty in plain, even profane
English.
“She’s really all right” is the speaker’s final, unpretentious, and tolerant judgment. In a loose, hedonistic
society where encounters are casual and occasional, he is not ashamed to admit that, neither presuming nor
desiring any exclusive claim to her attention, he meets her about once a year. Arnold lamented his inability to
rely on anything in this bleak universe except the woman standing beside him, and although Hecht’s speaker
exposes even that faith in personal love as deluded, he characterizes her as “dependable as they come.” It is
faint praise, since “they” evidently do not come very dependable at all, but the speaker seems willing, all in
all, to settle for much less—the merely human—than Arnold is.
The final line of “The Dover Bitch” is a nonchalant non sequitur, a further affront to the tradition of the
well-made poem. “And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d’Amour,” says the speaker, in an afterthought
that reinforces the image of an ordinary man speaking without premeditation. Nuit d’Amour, the name of
what is evidently either perfume or wine, answers the woman’s longing for “all the wine and enormous beds/
And blandishments in French and the perfumes,” a physical longing that Arnold’s metaphysical abstractions
leave unsatisfied. By contrast, Hecht’s speaker gives her Nuit d’Amour, which means “night of love” and
provides an alternative, carnal version of love in answer to Arnold’s abstract meditations.
Themes and Meanings
For all its mockery of Arnold, Hecht’s dramatic monologue is a tribute to the power that its predecessor
continues to exert. Moreover, for all its irreverence, “The Dover Bitch” is nevertheless a love poem, though it
is a poem about love without illusions—as if that were not a contradiction in terms, as if love were not
irreducibly itself an illusion. As an alternative to the elevated but perhaps empty sentiments that the speaker in
“Dover Beach” proffers his companion, Hecht’s speaker offers a kind of love that is candid and carnal, and
all the more ardent for his acceptance of his beloved’s imperfections. While Arnold can love the woman
standing beside him on the coast at Dover evidently only by elevating her into a disembodied philosophical
principle, Hecht’s speaker embraces concrete love by embracing a woman who is alive in an imperfect body,
one “running to fat.”
In The Study of Poetry Arnold called poetry “a criticism of life,” by which he meant not an attack on, but a
disinterested examination of, the subject as it is in itself. Hecht echoes the phrase in the subtitle he attaches to
“The Dover Bitch,” as though the poem that follows is, in contrast to Victorian obfuscations, going to allow
readers to examine life for what it is in itself. Hecht’s appropriation of the phrase “a criticism of life” is
Forms and Devices
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The Dover Bitch: The Dover Bitch
perhaps also a coy play on the contemporary sense of criticism as deprecation, as though the shabby world of
materialism and lust celebrated by the speaker is a sorry disappointment.
The speaker may be somewhat self-deluding when he presents himself as a clear-eyed modern man impatient
with Victorian sublimation. Hecht published “The Dover Bitch” in 1960, just before a wave of feminism
swept over American culture. The poem at first seems more sexually enlightened than its nineteenth century
predecessor, not only in its recognition of the claims of the libido but also in its refusal to treat a woman as
mere appendage to her male companion. However, just as in “Dover Beach,” the woman on the strand
remains unnamed and voiceless. Hecht’s poem imagines what is going on in the woman’s mind while she
listens to Arnold on the beach, but it refuses direct access to that mind, filtering it instead through the words
of the male speaker, who persistently reduces her to “this girl.” Though he poses as a champion of liberation,
he controls her thoughts and feelings. Hecht suggests that, though the speaker prides himself on seeing
through Victorian delusions to the tangible realities of the here and now, materialism and cynicism are simply
another set of illusions to which people cling as a stay against cosmic erosion.
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Themes and Meanings
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