Quatrains and devices

Form. The poem has six stanzas of four lines each. A four-line stanza is a quatrain.

Rhyme scheme: ABCB. Only lines 2 and 4 rhyme: talk/chalk, trees/bees, jets/spinnerets. Lines 1 and 3 do not, which keeps the poem light and chatty.

Devices:

• simile (comparison with like or as): 'A drop of water like hive of bees.'
• metaphor (a direct comparison): 'Of but an inch of moss a forest.' Under the glass, the moss is a forest.
• alliteration (repeated consonant sounds): 'woven web-silk', 'shells show in a scrap', 'silly flies that stumble'.
• personification (giving human qualities to something not human): 'I can make Magic talk.' The capital M treats Magic like a person.

Exclamation marks ('The tigerish claws he has!', 'with all those eyes!', 'in an afternoon!') are the sound of someone discovering something at that very moment.

The pattern. Again and again the poem shows something small and ordinary, then the amazing detail inside it. The last stanza breaks the pattern by going to the Moon: the same lens that makes small things big also brings far things near.

The speaker claims no powers of his own. 'I lie in wait and watch': the glass does the work; he only watches and wonders.