To Elsie

“To Elsie” is written in free verse, meaning it has no set form or meter. However, it is given a sense of visual balance and unity by its short, tight stanzas. There are 22 stanzas in total with three lines each, for a total of 66 lines. Each stanza is made up of a longer line, a shorter line, and then another longer line similar to an inverted haiku. Unlike a haiku, the number of syllables per line vary considerably.

The poem uses very little punctuation apart from em-dashes, which set off separate ideas. There are almost no commas and no periods, but rarely a capital letter will imply a new sentence as in “Unless it be” (Line 28) and “Somehow” (Line 59); however, it is nearly all one continuous run-on sentence. This gives the poem a sense of stream-of-consciousness, of one idea bleeding into another as the speaker examines the world around them.

Nearly all the lines in the poem are enjambed, meaning the sentence continues past the end of the line without a grammatical break. Each line and stanza flows continuously into the next. Sometimes it will be at a natural pause where the speaker would stop for breath—for example, “and rich young men with fine eyes” (Line 48)—while others seem to break off mid-thought, such as the standalone line “were” (Line 50) or “addressed to cheap” (Line 46).