What is the author's style in Darwin in 1881 by Gjertrud Schnackenberg?

In the 1980s, American poetry took a turn toward a more formal style of writing than the styles of the previous decades. Free verse certainly did not die out, but it did make room for the emergence of a poetic movement termed the new formalism.

"Darwin in 1881" is composed primarily in rhymed quatrains, or a series of four-line groups, following an a-b-b-a rhyming pattern. Consider the first four lines of the poem, with the endings "room," "miracles," "tales," and "loom." Here, lines 1 and 4 are identical rhymes, and 2 and 3 are slant, or close, rhymes. The next four lines follow a b-c-c-b pattern and consist of two identical rhymes: "upwells" with "tortoiseshells" and "crept" with "slept." This style is seen throughout the poem, although Schnackenberg allows herself the freedom to fluctuate between short, eight-line verses and longer ones, most divisible by four, but occasionally odd-numbered, as in the fifth stanza of this poem.