Across the continent the average birthrate has declined to a fatal 1.9 children for each mother in Italy, each hundred deaths is matched by only sixty-seven births, a figure that has collapsed catastrophically from ninety-six only ten years ago. He is prepared to work long hours for miserable wages and to assert himself in the roughhouse of London ghetto streets he is confident of his masculinity he hopes to build and lead a traditional family.Īlthough the Europe that receives him is a continent afflicted by demographic collapse, it nevertheless struggles with its evident and urgent need for this virile new principle that promises to rejuvenate the cultural and genetic life of its ageing and enervated liberal republics. After fleeing despair to save or improve himself, crawling under the barbed-wire fences that have sprung up across Europe, and perhaps stripped of his savings by trafficker mafiosi, his successful arrival at Dover indicates that he is very likely to be a superior human being. 1 The London tabloid headlines, reverting to distant wartime memories of the white cliffs cherished as symbols of virginal English inviolability, scream accusingly of an “invasion,” but by all historic moral measures our Ishmael should be reckoned a hero, the survivor of a transcontinental epic ordeal, a modern champion of the will. This damp but hopeful figure, who has fled the hecatombs of a Middle East shattered by foreign invasion, climate change, and the endemic civic corruption that has recently triggered the explosion that destroyed Beirut, stands boldly, far seeing, and sinless upon Dover Beach. Let us, in this essay, ponder this strange circumstance by tracing the imaginary but emblematic case of one such voyager: let him be a Syrian, drenched and fatigued yet wary and alert, praying that God should help him during the Home Office inquisition that is sure to come. The great symbol of a departing Christianity seems to have become an emblem of an arriving but destitute Islam. It is an irony and a calamity of our times that ninety percent of those who complete this odyssey and stagger up the beach are Muslims.

By the middle of 2020, more than two hundred migrants every night were making the hazardous and illegal Channel crossing to where “the cliffs of England stand.” Today’s Dover Beach is littered each morning with abandoned life vests and sometimes with the bodies of the drowned, as Border Agency staff lead the surviving castaways up the slope toward the town’s police station.Įurope no longer has a God, and hence it hears everything as the roar of broken fragments whirled around in meaningless though strangely evocative cycles of advance and regression. Since Arnold’s time, a century and a half of extreme events and cultural upheavals have left us so far on the other side of modernity that the girdle has fallen away and the once-loud roar itself seems hardly audible to most, submerged as we are in an age of postmodern non-referentiality in which all claims to truth are savored only as ironies, while humanity seems no longer conscious of the evident fact that it was designed, or has evolved, to swim in a spiritual sea.ĭover’s shingled beach is still there, of course, but it has become, in our traumatized and unsteady twenty-first century, the site of a different and unexpected wave, this time of a distressed refugee humanity. Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore As the lines gently move the reader on, a note of weltschmerz appears and grows, as the poet sorrowfully compares the ebbing Channel tide to the decline of the once rich and meaningful Christian worldview, which, to the poet, seemed to be increasingly undermined by science and the critical study of scripture. Pebbles which the waves suck back, and fling,Įver since its 1867 publication, which provoked the dismayed disapproval of what was then a still firmly Christian England, Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” has been known as one of the most iconic and wistful anthems of the modern loss of faith.

Eternal lands unoffical