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The poem is divided into four numbered sections, with each section, like a story, rising to a climax before it ends. This structure helps capture the reader's interest, inducing the reader to find out what will happen next. Each section is broken down, not quite equally, into stanzas, which are sections in poetry similar to paragraphs in prose. There are four stanzas in Parts I and II, five stanzas in Part III, and six in Part IV. Keeping the early sections shorter allows the poet to hold the reader's attention. The stanzas all contain the same basic structure: there are nine lines, with a rhyme scheme of aaaabcccb. This means that in each stanza the final sounds of the first four lines (coded as the a sound) are similar; Lines 5 and 9 rhyme (the b sound); and lines 6, 7 and 8 rhyme with each other. Unlike some poets, who try to de-emphasize or conceal rhymes, Tennyson brings attention to rhymes by making most of the lines end-stopped--the flow of words is brought to a halt by punctuation. This strong emphasis on rhymes helps to give the poem the feeling of an ancient tale, since it resembles poems from the time before printing was developed, when news was carried from town to town by word of mouth and rhyming aided memorization. The lines of this poem are written in iambic tetrameter. An
"iamb" is a unit of poetry (referred to as a "poetic
foot") that has an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed
syllable--in the first line, for example, the syllables "eith"
"side" "riv" and "lie" are accented
more heavily than the syllables that come before them. Iambic
poetry closely follows the up-and-down pattern of English speech,
making the poem's structure hardly noticeable. Tetrameter means
that there are four feet to each line ("tetra" is the
Greek word for "four"), for a total of eight syllables
to each line.
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