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The appropriateness of each aspect of God to the experience offered by the specific hour of day may be viewed in terms of a deepening spiritual maturity on the part of the speaker. He moves from an initial devotion to God, through love for God, to a state of oneness with God in which he claims God as partner. Each advance is forecast, to some extent, by the parallel structure itself.

Aside from Hopkins and, to a lesser extent, Pound and Dickinson, the use of the compound noun in English poetry has hitherto been restricted. Although our language permits compounding, convention has drawn us increasingly away from this constellated form towards more discursive and explanative forms, "the rim of the welkin," for example, rather than "welkinrim." Edwin Gerow suggests that this movement may be explained in terms of a basic change in the minimal unit of composition. With the advent of prose, he argues, Western literary taste shifted from the stanza to the work or chapter.[50] In the case of Indian literature, however, the late appearance of prose significantly preserved the brevity and tautness of the classical Sanskrit stanzas Gerow continues:

The poetry of classical India was microcosmic poetry. The locus of composition was a minimal unit of expression, the stanza, and this is to be understood in a quite radical way as excluding larger units of composition such as the chapter or the work itself.

"The tendency," he adds,

is toward the expression of one bewilderingly complex but stringently coherent idea or image within the stanzaic unit. The stanza imposes its form on the poetic content, which is delivered compactly as image, as figure.[51]