The poetry of Portraits Deep in the Castle consists of Shakespearean sonnets, a formal ode, a ballad, and three lyrics. 

The Shakespearean sonnets--there are eight in English and one in Italian--are in iambic pentameter and make some use of half-rhyme in a rhyme scheme of a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d-e-f-e-f-g-g.  This rhyme scheme groups the lines into three quatrains and a concluding couplet.  Each quatrain constitutes a definite step in the development of the poem, with the couplet usually having an epigrammatic or aphoristic quality.  Click here for an example.

The formal ode is a rhymed presentation of the solemn but exalted theme of an ill-fated love for a beautiful woman.  To use Ben Jonson's terms, the poem develops according to the repetition of the stanzaic pattern, turn, counter-turn, and stand, or to use ancient Greek terms, applicable to the odes of Pindar (522 - 443 B.C.), the master of this form:  strophe, antistrophe, and epode.  The form of A.J.'s poem owes much to the influence of Jonson's ode  to Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morrison.

The ballad tells a fanciful and heroic story of true love; the lyrics express love for a wife and son.

Both the ode and the ballad make use of colorful, geometrical forms--rectangles and circles--in place of some names and other words, partly as a form of self-censorship, partly as an attempt to go beyond the limitations of words and still maintain meaning within the containing form of a verbal structure.

In his poetry, A.J. has often striven for the aphoristic serenity Frost achieves in such poems as "Mending Wall," "The Road Not Taken," and "Acquainted with the Night."  A.J. has also striven for something of the thematic complexity of Shakespeare, though A.J.'s presentation tends toward a straightforward transparency and Shakespeare, especially in his sonnets, tends, for various good reasons, among them the archaic condition of his language, to be rather opaque.