This analysis of these first six lines reveals many things that might not be noticed on first reading it. Yane is rarely difficult to understand; she had the happy knack of being able to play with language without having to resort to obscure vocabulary. Accessibility and comprehensibility are two of the most admirable and noticeable features of her writing.

Another is her adroit command of cadence. In the case of The Bumblebee, the masterly rhythm of the opening couplet sets the tone for the rest of the poem. Scanning this distich gives:

Note the expert use of aphæresis at the start of the second line; ‘betwixt’ becomes ‘’twixt’ as Yane brilliantly avoids the problem of creating an extra syllable. Here we have the iambic tetrameter, the deceptively simple metre that characterises much of Yane’s poetry. We see it again in The Water Vole:

and in the triolets of The Snail:

However, it should not be forgotten that she was not afraid to use other metres. She uses elegiac stanzas (or heroic quatrains), based on the iambic pentameter, in the 12,000-line epic The Sheep: