The Will of Testing is a dramatic poetic form, originating in The Glamorous Asparagus. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is a single couplet. Use of metaphor is characteristic of the form. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines reverse grammatical structures. Each line has five feet with a syllable weight pattern of short-short-long (quantitative anapaestic pentameter). The ending of each line of the poem shares the same rhyme. The second line of the couplet is required to maintain the phrasing of the first line. The first line concerns the past. The second line concerns the future.