Dover Beach (published in 1867), is the most famous poem by Matthew Arnold and is generally considered one of the most important poems of the 19th century. It was first published in the collection New Poems.
The "famous simile" in the final lines "descriptive of armies engaged in dubious conflict by night, was probably inspired by the well-known passage in Thucydides' account of the battle of Epipolae. Here are to be found the details used by Arnold: a night-attack, fought upon a plain at the top of a cliff, in the moonlight, so that the soldiers could not distinguish clearly between friend and foe, with the resulting flight of certain Athenian troops, and various 'alarms,' watchwords, and battle-cries shouted aloud to the increasing confusion of all." Honan notes that John Henry Newman had used the image once "when he defined controversy as a sort of 'night battle'" and the image also occurs in Arthur Hugh Clough's The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich. Tinker and Lowry point out that "there is evidence that the passage about the 'night-battle' was familiar coin among Rugbeians" at the time Arnold attended Rugby and studied under his father Dr. Thomas Arnold.
The anonymous figure to whom Arnold addresses his poem becomes the subject of Hecht's poem. In Hecht's poem she "caught the bitter allusion to the sea", imagined "what his whiskers would feel like / On the back of her neck", and felt sad as she looked out across the channel. "And then she got really angry" at the thought that she had become "a sort of mournful cosmic last resort." After which she says "one or two unprintable things."