"For An Assyrian Frieze" makes use of a regular line structure. The poem is constructed as a series of three-line stanzas of loose iambic pentameter. For the most part, each line has five feet that each consist of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, but as is customary today even among the most conservative practitioners of traditional verse, some lines will have eleven syllables and some might have even twelve, but almost every line has only five stressed syllables.

There is no end-rhyme in the poem. Had there been, this poem would have potentially been in the Italian verse form terza rima, in which the poet uses three-line stanzas with the rhyme scheme aba bcb cdc and so on. This would have been an especially appropriate choice, because the two best-known examples of terza rima are Dante Aligheri's Comme-clia Divina and Percy Shelley's "The Triumph of...