The Barren Bone is a dramatic poetic form intended to teach a moral lesson concerning The Ford of Kobold-bulbs, originating in The Intrinsic Hemp-Stalk. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is two quintains. Use of alliteration and metonymy is characteristic of the form. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines sometimes have reversed word orders. Every line of the poem has a terminal caesura. The ending of each line of the poem shares the same rhyme.