What is the poet's style in the poem, Adam’s Curse?

Adam’s Curse is made up of what’s known as heroic couplets, which is a series of AABB rhyming lines in iambic pentameter. This is a very traditional choice which was already falling out of favour in contemporary poetry at the time of this poem’s publication, thus alluding to the invisible yet meticulous mechanics the speaker expresses about the art of poetry. The only real variation in this form is a dropped line break which takes one line of iambic pentameter and splits it into two, in order to create a pause between two ideas: “The martyrs call the world.’ / And thereupon” (Lines 14-15). This can arguably be referred to as a single line rather than two lines, as it follows the established pattern. The poem is otherwise broken into three stanzas: one longer stanza of 28 lines, and two shorter stanzas of six and five lines. Each stanza break represents a shift in the narrative of the poem; the first represents a lively conversation between friends; the second stanza represents their quiet introspection following the conversation; and the final stanza represents the speaker’s new line of thought towards the past they share with the one they love.