Mid-Victorian poetry balances the basics of perspective, reason, and love. Matthew Arnold digs within himself to find his personal feelings in life and expresses them through poems of loneliness, isolation, and beauty. Matthew Arnold expresses the sea as an archetypal symbolic pattern of setting throughout "To Marguerite-Continued" and "Dover Beach" in order to present the speaker's solitude and inclination for a personal relationship, while additionally displaying apparent similarities and differences between the two poems.
             The sea represents an escape, a set of timelessness, and a home for the unconscious, which is similar through both poems. In "To Marguerite-Continued", the speaker's love for a woman represents the analogical symbol by the sea. Isolation centers this poem in which the speaker yearns for isolation, but with a companion. Parallel to this is "Dover Beach," where love and the same apparent long for a mate continues. The sea shapes the concurrent natural setting of both poems, which produces the image of an island, together with a sense of peacefulness, isolation, and hope.
             Incongruity plays an important role in differentiating the overall meaning and attitude between "To Marguerite-Continued" and "Dover Beach". "To Marguerite-Continued", the seaside is a domicile from society, and a home for the speaker's meditation, and inner hope. This meaning therefore results in a reason that the speaker's feels confined to his/her life and trapped inside from any type of relationship or love. "Dover Beach" deals with the speaker's hope for a spiritual connection, with God and a personal relationship with a woman/man. Matthew Arnold's account of the sea provides various meanings and attitudes for each reader and interpreted in different ways.
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