Tennyson was an expert metricist, but in this poem he keeps things pretty simple, sticking with the standard meter of English, iambic pentameter.
This poem reveals Wulfstan as perhaps the most accomplished Latin metricist which Anglo-Saxon England produced.
He remarked that Paul was a 'wretched metricist'.
This establishes the position of the songs within the German tradition and suggests fundamental structural principles to the metricist as well as the musicologist.
Since his death an attempt has been made to minimise his importance and even to deny that he is a real poet and to describe him as a mere virtuoso and skilful metricist.