The stanzas are rhymed closed couplets. The poem proceeds by this series of closed statements which allow no argument and echo the blinkered vision of the speaker. Each stanza after the opening one begins with ‘And', as do many of the lines. The trochaic metre of stanzas two, three and four emphasises this word, thus increasing the obsessive drive of the poem. We are invited to follow the logical progression of the speaker's behaviour to its climax. We are also encouraged, therefore, to see it as inevitable.
When the metre alters to iambic, in l.2, 4 and the final line, there is a sense of the forward momentum decelerating, as the situation is summed up. The regularity of the tetrameter is only broken once with the omitted syllable in l.7 before ‘smiles', which has the effect of ‘wrong footing' the reader, just as the smiles themselves are designed to trip up the speaker's enemy. The sibilants of the second stanza also indicates the presence of lurking evil.