The Sullen Emergence is a dramatic poetic form intended to satirize immortality, originating in The Inefficient Evils. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is an extremely long series of quatrains. Use of metaphor is characteristic of the form. Each line has four feet with a syllable weight pattern of short-long (quantitative iambic tetrameter). The fourth line of each quatrain contrasts the underlying meaning of the second line.