The Pensive Metallurgy is a poetic riddle, originating in The Equality of Foreknowledges. The form guides poets during improvised performances. The poem is divided into three distinct parts: a series of quatrains, a series of quintains and a series of fourteen-line stanzas. Use of epenthesis, metaphor and vivid imagery is characteristic of the form. Forms of parallelism are common throughout the poem, in that certain lines are required to maintain phrasing, they use the same placement of allusions, they sometimes have reversed word orders and they reverse grammatical structures.