A comparison of Victorian and modernist perceptions illustrated by Dover Beach and The Love Song by J. Alfred PrufrockMatthew Arnold and TS Eliot, in their respective poems, share a feeling of alienation, not only from others but also from nature and God. Arnold writes at a time when man's place in the universe is being called into question, for the first time since the advent of Christianity. He can no longer find the same comfort in nature and God's love as his romantic predecessors. However, while Arnold speaks of isolation, he is still speaking to a lover at Dover Beach, while Prufrock is presented as a man completely withdrawn into himself. Eliot's isolation is total. In Arnold's industrialized era, people could no longer take inspiration from nature; the depopulated country of Worth's time was no longer accessible to a centralized people. The accelerated pace of life and urban overpopulation prevented the romantic from being able to reflect in natural solitude. As the poet observes nature at Dover Beach, the experience is metaphorically useful, but it is not an end in itself and provides no comfort. Arnold instead uses the futility he sees in the ocean tides to illustrate the futility of human effort. Although the sea appears calm [line 1], beneath the surface this almost cruel drama is playing out, as pebbles are dragged and tossed by the waves and brought back, producing a "grinding roar." [lines 9-12] The image of human beings as pebbles on the sand returns in the third stanza, when Arnold refers to the "Sea of ​​Faith" which receded and left the rocks exposed like " bare shingles.” Later, Eliot also repudiates the... middle of paper ... he speaks almost instantly. Arnold's last paragraph serves as a sort of summary of Dover Beach as a whole. At the end of Prufrock, Eliot launches into a seemingly tangential reflection on mermaids. It's not his role to explain what Prufrock is talking about. Eliot transformed the conundrum of modern life into a poem, rather than using his work to provide an answer to the questions facing humanity. Arnold seems to mourn a bygone era when people could turn to faith for answers to questions of matter. Eliot recognizes that those days will never return and instead encourages the reader to apply personal meaning to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Works Cited: TS Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Flight. 2. ed. MH Abrams New York, London: Norton, 1993.