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.
Paris: A Poem a nursery game. It does not belong to the art of poetry." Contemporary critics have noted that "Paris" uses techniques that anticipate important modernist works. Like Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and James Joyce's Ulysses, the poem depicts a single day in a modern city and explores the unconscious. With its fragmented voices and inclusion of notes written by the author, it also anticipates The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. Parmar speculates that because Eliot also published his poetry with Hogarth Press, he likely knew that "Paris" existed and may have even read it before writing "The Waste Land". Paris: