Iambic Trimeter With a Little Flexibility
We hope you didn't get too seasick with all the down and up movement of iambic trimeter in this little sea shanty. But hey, even if you did, at least you know it was all for the sake of poetry, which makes the journey worth it, right?
By choosing to go with iambic trimeter, Frost must have been thinking of the waves of the sea. The unstressed/stressed syllabic pattern of three iambs in a row (daDUM daDUM daDUM) allows us to see and hear the sea as we read. It's almost as if we're sucked right into the mesmerizing lullaby of the sea's repetitive waves as the speaker lulls us into the poem's wavy sound and rhythm.
Take, for example, line 2:
all turn and look one way.
We really hear that down and up pattern, and we hear the sound of waves rhythmically crashing ashore as we read it.
Rogue Waves?
There are moments, though, when it sounds as if the speaker isn't staying completely true to iambic trimeter. Line 4, for example, starts out sounding true to the pattern, but by the middle we hear a slight divergence in "at the" which are both consecutive unstressed syllables. So we've got some flexibility from time to time, which serves to prove that Frost is indeed a modern poet who's not afraid of having some elbowroom in form and meter.
But then we notice that the poem looks mighty precise in its form with only four stanzas containing four lines each. We also haven an alternating rhyme scheme (ABAB) that's mighty common, and also sounds wavelike as it moves between end rhymes: sand/land, way/day.
Overall, "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep" is a good balance between conventional form and meter with a dash of the modern. We hear the modern influence most clearly in both the speaker's colloquial diction and occasional divergences from the poem's general meter. So yes, we're keeping things old school but we haven't forgotten what time it is.