The Byway of Mainmasts is a poetic narrative intended to renounce a journey, originating in The Chronic Barbarity. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is a single quatrain. Use of assonance and juxtaposition is characteristic of the form. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines reverse grammatical structures. Each line has two syllables. Every line of the poem has a medial caesura. The fourth line of the quatrain is required to maintain the phrasing of the third line. The fourth line of the quatrain uses the same placement of allusions as the first line. The fourth line of the quatrain presents a different view of the subject of the second line. The third line of the quatrain must expand the idea of the first line.