One of the tests I do to check a poem is to remove all the stanza breaks, line breaks, etc, and see what is left. I see breaks and forms as helpers, guides, notes, not as the poem itself. Many a cake fails without heaping on the icing. When writing a poem, remove all the devices and see if it is still interesting. Try it. This gets done anyway, often in reviews when a poem is quoted without the form to save page space.
Here is the ED. To me, it brings out the excellence and interest and without the stumbling caps. I think what I am trying to say is that without any structure it still works, as any poem should.
A narrow fellow in the grass occasionally rides; You may have met him,--did you not, his notice sudden is. The grass divides as with a comb, a spotted shaft is seen; and then it closes at your feet and opens further on. He likes a boggy acre, a floor too cool for corn. Yet when a child, and barefoot, I more than once at morn, have passed, I thought, a whip-lash unbraiding in the sun,-- when, stooping to secure it, it wrinkled, and was gone. Several of nature's people I know, and they know me; I feel for them a transport of cordiality; but never met this fellow, attended or alone, without a tighter breathing, and zero at the bone.
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