The Philosophical Passion-fruit is a dramatic poetic form intended to express grief over the future, originating in The Diagonal Sea-Monster. 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 vivid imagery is characteristic of the form. Forms of parallelism are common throughout the poem, in that certain lines often contrast underlying meaning and they have similar grammatical structures. Each line has five feet with a syllable weight pattern of long-short (quantitative trochaic pentameter). The second line of the couplet reverses the grammatical structure of the first line.