The Incontestable Topic is a poetic riddle which grew out of the performances of The Remorseless Bells. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is a single tercet. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines often contrast underlying meaning. Each line has five feet with a syllable weight pattern of long-short-long (quantitative cretic pentameter). The first line is intended to make an assertion. The second line is intended to make a counter-assertion. The third line is intended to synthesize previous ideas.