The Flowery Spathe is a ribald poetic form intended to amuse the audience, originating in The Race of Speech. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is divided into three distinct parts: a tercet, a sexain and a couplet. Use of epenthesis is characteristic of the form. Forms of parallelism are common throughout the poem, in that certain lines often contrast underlying meaning and they sometimes have reversed word orders. Each line has ten syllables.