What is the poet's style in the poem, The Vine?

This poem has a rather unconventional form. It does not fall neatly into any existing poetic genre, but rather seems to create its own poetic construction.

The poem is written in rhyming couplets, which means that (purportedly) each line rhymes with the line right after or right before it. This is a common poetic meter, and often creates a constructed or even sing-songy feel in a work of poetry.

However, although Herrick follows a rhyming couplet rhyme scheme, he does not do so closely. Instead, he makes extensive use of near-rhyme and slant rhyme. For instance: “waist” and “embraced” do not really end with the same sound, and “took” and “awoke” are not perfect rhymes, as they have entirely different vowel sounds (7, 8, 20, 21). Furthermore, there is an extra line in the rhyme scheme in lines 9-11: rhyming “hung” with “among” with “behung,, which is not part of any existing rhyme scheme.

The poem does have a regular meter: each line is octosyllabic, written loosely in iambs (one unstressed, followed by one stressed, syllable). This meter tends to create a sense of something being unfinished, as it is instinctively compared by the hearer to the far more common iambic pentameter, of which it is short two syllables. This sense of incompletion is appropriate for a poem about sexual desire. It is as though the line is always reaching for something that is not quite there, just as the vine itself does.

Ultimately, Herrick uses a free and changing structure to express the themes of the poem, which contributes to its sense of readability for modern audiences and which communicates the poem’s themes of freedom through fantasy.