There was no doubt that religious beliefs were challenged during the Victorian Era. Both Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and the industrial revolution have caused a new loss of faith amongst the average person. The bible was becoming questioned and all that was natural was replaced by what was industrial. Religion took a backseat to science and it seemed as if God was powerless against the rising age of machine. Both Hopkins and Arnold express their views towards this in their poems `Gods Grandeur' and `Dover Beach'. Though they both try to find `the truth' in their poems, their powerful yet different uses of images, tone and structure give them two distinct poems and two different conclusions.

The images in both poems are very vivid but at the same time bring an underlying symbolic meaning to them. In `Dover Beach', Arnold uses many contrasting images to show the...