There isn't actually any strict meter or rhyme scheme in this, perhaps Isaac Rosenberg's most famous poem. Instead, Rosenberg uses free verse, in which there is no regular line length or number of feet to a line. Nor is there any rhyme scheme. We can find some structure in the poem, however—the last line is, in terms of its length and number of stressed syllables, an echo of the first, giving the poem the sense of having come full circle. The shape of the poem on the page, too, is interesting, with the longer lines confined to the middle of the poem, such that it seems to bow out and then curve back in again, a reflection of the way days "break" in the trenches and then recede again monotonously.

In the absence of rhyme and regular meter, Rosenberg uses other poetic devices to lend cohesion to the poem, such as repetition—note the repetition of "what" toward the end of the poem, and "drop . . . dropping." We also find alliteration in the poem, as in "hurled . . . heavens." These are techniques that have been used in English poetry since before rhyme was ever a popular convention.

Isaac Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches” is unusual among the British poetry of World War I in that Rosenberg was the son of a poor Jewish immigrant unlike the better known war poets who were upper middle or upper class products of public school and Oxbridge educations. The prosodic technique of the poem is unusual for the Georgians, lacking the polished traditional shape of better known poems by Owens and Brooke, and looking more towards the modernist cadences of Pound and Williams.

The poem is unrhymed free verse. Most of the lines are either trimeter or tetrameter, in a generally rising rhythm (iambs and anapaests), but the rhythmical pattern is basically irregular, with line breaks working rhetorically rather than metrically, in the manner of much imagist verse.