The Song of Hiawatha is an epic poem comprising 23 long stanzas, or cantos, with the first being an introduction and the following cantos being titled I-XXII. It follows a strict trochaic tetrameter—eight syllables per line, following a pattern of one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable: “Should you ask me, whence these stories” (1.1)? Longfellow believed that this trochaic rhythm mirrored the chants of Indigenous tribes and lent the poem an authentic sound. While this belief may have been an oversimplification, the trochaic meter does jar slightly from what the ear would have been accustomed to at the time of writing—the more typical iambic rhythm, which uses an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable—creating a sense of cultural immersion and authenticity. Some scholars posit that Longfellow was inspired by the trochaic tetrameter used in the Kalevala, a Finnish epic with similarities to Hiawatha.

There is extensive repetition throughout the poem, a stylistic device that enhances the song-like quality of the piece. The first canto opens with a type of repetition called anaphora, where the same grammatical construction recurs multiple times for emphasis: