Her first collections contain free verse and traditional verse, but the most remarkable poems were those which did away with the old way of writing verse. She used the syllabic count instead of meter (iamb, trochee, anapest . . .). For instance,¡§An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle . . .¡¨follows the traditional iambic rhythm with regular stanzas well divided one from the other.¡§In the Days of Prismatic Colour¡¨the traditional rhythm has gone and is replaced by the number of syllables instead of feet. The annotations of this Study Guide gives as exact a count of syllables as can be worked out from the text, showing a repetition of the same number of syllables in corresponding lines from stanza to stanza in the early poems, but becoming more irregular as Marianne Moore became more adept with this technique.
In her mind the stanza was the rhythmic unit, not the line, and in later poems she writes run-on stanzas as traditional poets used to write run-on lines. The effect of this use of verse is a conversational tone that tries to capture the rhythms and accents of ordinary speech.