The Flowery Bitter-orange is a poetic riddle intended to express pleasure with a chosen subject, originating in The Totem of Raising. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is four quintains. Use of assonance, metaphor and simile is characteristic of the form. Forms of parallelism are common throughout the poem, in that certain lines are required to maintain phrasing and they have similar grammatical structures. Each line has three syllables. The third line of each quintain reverses the word order of the second line.