Dickinson constructed the great majority of her poems around the short stanza forms and poetic rhyme schemes of familiar nursery rhymes and Protestant hymns. "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass," for instance, is written in six quatrains, or stanzas of four lines each, rhyming only in the second and fourth lines. Most, but not all, of the rhythms are iambic, meaning the poem has regularly recurring two-syllable segments, or feet, in which the first syllable is unstressed and the second syllable is stressed. The first two quatrains of the poem are laid out in the hymn meter called common meter, alternately eight and six syllables to the line. But Dickinson narrows the pattern thereafter to sevens and sixes, alternately seven and six syllables to the line.

Dickinson made many deviations from the conventional exact rhyme used by her poet contemporaries. "Alone/bone" in the final stanza is this...