A Prayer for My Daughter its "metremes", or rhymical motifs, rather than common metrical devices. The poem also may be read to consist of straightforward iambic verse that relies on common metrical devices such as elision, acephalous lines, promotion, and metrical inversion. Lines 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8 of each stanza are iambic pentameter; lines 4, 6, and 7 are iambic tetrameter. For instance, using traditional principles of scansion, stanza two may be scanned as shown below, where syllables in all caps represent metrical beats, lower-case syllables represent metrical off-beats, the vertical bar represents the termination of a metrical foot, and apostrophes represent elisions.
Eureka: A Prose Poem as a "prose poem" goes against some of his own "rules" of poetry which he laid out in "The Philosophy of Composition" and "The Poetic Principle". In particular, Poe called the ideal poem short, at most 100 lines, and utilizing the "most poetical topic in the world": the death of a beautiful woman. Poe himself suggested that the work be judged only as a work of art, not of science, possibly dismissing the seriousness of "Eureka". Though he is using mathematical and scientific terms, he may really be talking about aesthetics and suggesting there is a close connection between science