Cummings’ most important structuring devices in this poem are refrains and repeated grammatical patterns. Two of the refrains are strings of four nouns, the first series referring to the seasons ("spring summer autumn winter," line 3, then those same words in a different order in lines 11 and 34); and the second series refering to more specific natural phenomena, all related to the sky ("sun moon stars rain" in lines 8 and 36, and a variant order of these nouns in line 21). Another refrain, "with up so floating many bells down" (line 2) is repeated exactly in line 24. Both times the phrase is in parentheses.

The most important repeated grammatical pattern first appears as "more by more," (line 12), formed probably by taking the familiar "more and more" and fitting it into the pattern of the equally familiar "little by little." This "x by x" pattern soon changes to "x by y" in line 13: "when by now and tree by leaf." Altogether, these two patterns occur thirteen times in the poem, becoming so dominant in lines 27 through 32 that their effect is almost incantatory. The most frequent syntactic pattern is two juxtaposed independent clauses, each having a personal pronoun as its subject, a transitive verb in the past tense, then the verb’s object preceded by a possessive pronoun:

[Here Nixon quotes ll. 4, 7, 14, and 19-20.]

So familiar does this pattern become that the following lines are perceived as variants of it, each with the verb and object compounded:

[Here Nixon quotes ll. 17, 18, 33, and 35.]

In addition, the grammatical pattern of line 5 is exactly the same as that of line 33:

[Here Nixon quotes ll. 5 and 33.]

Finally, Cummings uses parentheses so frequently in this poem (seven times) that they may be considered a sort of typographical pattern of recurrence.