“The Darkling Thrush” has four stanzas with eight lines each. Hardy composed the poem in the common meter traditional of ballads, which means the lines alternate between four-stresses (iambic tetrameter) and three-stresses each (iambic trimeter). These lines are called “iambic” because they are made up of iambs, a metrical foot which consists of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable.

A typical four-line unit in “The Darkling Thrush” scans like this (stressed syllables in bold):

The land's | sharp fea- | tures seemed | to me

The Cen- | tury's corpse | outleant,

Its crypt | the cloud- | y ca- | nopy,

The wind | its death- | lament.

The rhyme scheme is ABABCDCD; every other line of each four-line unit rhymes.

Hardy’s adherence to standard meter and rhyme is an important aspect of his poetic identity. Unlike experimental poets like Walt Whitman, for example, he does not bend or break traditional forms. Here, the poem’s hymn-like, musical qualities connect it both to birdsong and to religious ceremony (like the evensongs sung at Mass).