The Pine-nut of Gorillas is a poetic narrative intended to express pleasure with a chosen subject, originating in The Avarice of Improving. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is seven eleven-line stanzas. The Pine-nut of Gorillas is always written from the perspective of the author. Use of assonance is characteristic of the form. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines sometimes have reversed word orders. Each line has four feet with a syllable weight pattern of short-long (quantitative iambic tetrameter). Every line of the poem has a terminal caesura. The tenth line of each stanza must expand the idea of the ninth line.