The Not Retaliation is a poetic form intended to describe war, originating in The Aware Rapacity. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is three to five tercets. Use of consonance and metaphor is characteristic of the form. Forms of parallelism are common throughout the poem, in that certain lines often contrast underlying meaning and they are required to maintain phrasing. Each line has five feet with a syllable weight pattern of short-long (quantitative iambic pentameter). The second line of each tercet shares the underlying meaning of the first line.