Wilde’s poem employs a variation of the ballad stanza (hence the title, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”). Ballad stanzas were most closely associated with English folk poetry and usually featured a quatrain (four-line stanza) with alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, and with an ABCB rhyme scheme. An iamb is a metrical foot in which an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable (da-DUM). A tetrameter is a line made up of four metrical feet, while a trimeter is a line with three feet. Wilde’s take on the ballad, on the other hand, uses sestets (six-line stanzas). Like in the typical ballad, the lines alternate between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter; stanzas employ an ABCBDB rhyme scheme. The poem has a total of 109 stanzas divided into six sections.

Iambic feet in English poetry can be substituted to vary the rhythm. Possible substitutions include replacing an iamb with a trochee (DUM-da), as in line 32 of Section 1 (“Quickened”), or replacing two iambic feet with a double iamb—a pyrrhic (da-da) followed by a spondee (DUM-DUM), as in line 4 of Section 1 (“When they | found him”).