Even in its original Spanish, "Fear" follows no strict rhyming or rhythmic pattern. This is appropriate because the speaker of the poem, sleeping on a straw mattress and worrying that her daughter will one day be too good to associate with her, is a simple woman and would naturally not have a voice that is too polished or refined. Still, there are sections that follow rhythmic structures, which has more to do with displaying the poet's skill than the character's personality. This poem is predominantly, but loosely, iambic, which means that the rhythm that occurs most frequently is the iamb. An iamb is a combination of one unstressed syllable with one stressed syllable. A line like "and nev-er fly a-gain to my straw bed" starts out iambic before losing the pattern at the end; the line "and when night came no lon-ger" is iambic with...