In Rudyard Kipling's Recessional and Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, both authors evoke feelings of doubt about their great homeland, England. Being writers of the Victorian age, they encountered scientific discoveries and material prosperity that caused great anxiety to the English people. This era, as Walter E. Houghton states, can be characterized by “widespread doubts about the nature of man, society and the universe”. By analyzing both poems, one can agree that Walker Houghton is indeed correct in his observation that the Victorian age was indeed marked by doubt, simply by the choice of diction, language, and use of imagery in the poems. Houghton suggests that the Victorian age was "characterized by doubt about the nature of man, society and the universe", and indeed he is right. In Kipling's poem Recession, a feeling of extreme doubt about society is almost overbearing. Kipling almost instantly expresses a vile and negative mood, when he states: "Under whose terrible hand we hold, dominion over palm and pine" (Kipling, 3-4). Continue this negative state of mind throughout ...