The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The plethera of caesura, punctuation in the middle of a line of poetry, and end-stop, punctuation at the end of a line of poetry, create a disrupted and unorganized rythm which mimics the message of Arnold's poem: without religion, the world will be unorganized and chaotic.

Throughout the poem, the sea acts as an extended metaphor for the world, which Arnold describes as enveloped in sadness with the loss of religion from the world.

Light is an extended metaphor for religion, as the poem descries a world without religion as filled with darkness, devoid of the light of religion.

As the sea is a metaphor for the earth, the pebbles serve as metaphor for people, who are lost in an earthly world without any direction from religion.

The polysyndeton in this line elongates the list and makes the trials of the pebbles, metaphorically representing the life of the people, appear long and troublesome.

By attributing the human emotion of sadness to the sea through personification, Arnold appeal to pathos.

Allusion to the myth of Theseus and Aegeas further heightens the pathos of the poem by alluding to the tragic suicide of a father, Aegeas, aafter a misunderstanding when he presumes that his son, Theseus, is dead, and thus Aegeas kills himself. However, Aegeas' death was needless because Theseus was not dead, which implies that the death of religion is also needless, and therefore the subsequent suffering of humanity, Theseus, at the death of religion, Aegeas, is also needless.

The "Sea of Faith" acts as a metaphor alluding to a time when religion was present in the world, particularly the Middle Ages when religion was prevalent.

This simile contrasts with the "naked shingles of the world."

The asyndeton present in this line acts to lengthen the list of adjectives describing the roar and heightens its description.

The anaphora in these lines emphasizes Arnold's nihilistic view of life without religion through the repetition of "nor."

The adjective "ignorant" describes the human race without religion in the world;without religion, humanity is like ignorant armies fighting in the dark, completely unaware and uninformed. This description is also an allusion to a passage in Thukydides battle of Epipolae.

The absence of meter or rhyme scheme in the poem further emphasize the chaos and disorder in the world without religion.