anyone lived in a pretty how town

This poem contains nine quatrains—stanzas of four lines—that flow with the poem’s obsession with cycles and seasons (four seasons for four lines).

The poem mostly follows an AABB rhyme scheme, though this isn’t a strict pattern, and makes use of both perfect (“down”/“town”) and imperfect rhymes (“same”/“rain”).

The most interesting aspect of the poem’s form and meter is its rhythm. Cummings does not follow a traditional pattern like iambic pentameter; instead, he uses accentual verse. Accentual verse is a meter that focuses on accents per line. In this poem’s case, the lines each contain four stressed syllables. Here is an example of how the poem uses these stresses:

children guessed(but only a few

and down they forgot as up they grew

autumn winter spring summer)

that noone loved him more by more

(Lines 9-12)

As this stanza shows, most of the lines alternate between stressed and unstressed syllables. The alternating gives the poem a singsong feel, and the consistent stresses follow traditional nursery rhyme formats. For example, compare the above stanza to a stanza from “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”:

Twinkle Twinkle Little star

How I wonder what you are

Up above the world so high

Like a diamond in the sky.