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Suffering
"Dover Beach" doesn't give you a pretty Disney-fied view of life (although maybe that's not fair to Disney—we're still a little freaked out by the beginning of Bambi). The speaker confronts the pain and suffering in the world head-on, no holds barred. While the world might seem nice to look at sometimes (like on a moonlit night), it's really just an endless and confusing wilderness of pain.
The only real antidote to suffering that the poem offers is love, and more specifically, the faithfulness of one person to another. That's all we got in this mad, mad world, Shmoopers.
Suffering is a powerful and inevitable force in "Dover Beach," and it lurks under everything that seems beautiful and lasting, slowly eating it away. Hey, no one said this poem is uplifting.
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