‘Dover Beach’ is one of the best-known and best-loved of Victorian poems, and the most widely anthologised poem by a Victorian figure whose poetic output was considerably slimmer than that of many of his contemporaries, such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson or Robert Browning. Time has not been overly kind to Matthew Arnold either: the poems for which he is remembered in the popular imagination tend to be confined to ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’, ‘To Marguerite: Continued’, ‘Shakespeare’, and – most of all – ‘Dover Beach’, which has been subjected to much critical analysis already. The main theme behind Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" is the idea that earth used to be full of faith, but change has negatively affected the value of faith in humans and in God.