The first two stanzas of Dover Beach upkeep the imagery which the irregular meter supports the flow of the sea. The Dover Beach is a poem with the mournful tone of an elegy and the individual intensity of a dramatic monologue because the meter and rhyme differ from line to line and the poem is said to be in free verse that is it is unencumbered by the strictures of traditional versification. There is cadence in the poem achieved throught the following: alliteration, parallel structure, rhyming words, and words suggesting rhythm. The comparison of human misery to the ebb and flow of the sea is a metaphor of turbid ebb and flow of human misery.