"The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower" is made up of four stanzas, each with five lines, followed by an ending couplet. Its meter is often described as iambic pentameter, a line of verse featuring five segments of two syllables ("feet") where the first syllable is unstressed and the second is stressed, as in the word "above." But Thomas's poetry seldom fits neatly into conventional metric analysis. While most poems contain some irregularity in meter, Thomas's poetry uses more variation than most. Thus many critics choose to view his poetry in terms of the number of syllables in each line, rather than by metric feet. Thus "The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower" may also be described as decasyllabic, having ten syllables in a line. Thomas's predominant use of one-syllable words frequently means that the stress or emphasis in a line depends...