The Cynosure of Forces is a poetic riddle concerning immortality, originating in The Obsidian of Apples. 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 internal rhyme, assonance, epenthesis and simile is characteristic of the form. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines have similar grammatical structures. Each line has four feet with a syllable weight pattern of short-short-long (quantitative anapaestic tetrameter). The ending of each line of the poem shares the same rhyme. The second line of the couplet must expand the idea of the first line. The first line is intended to make an assertion. The second line is intended to invert the previous assertion.