The Song of Glossing is a poetic form concerning a lover, originating in The Confederacies of Habit. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is divided into three distinct parts: three to four thirteen-line stanzas, five tercets and two fourteen-line stanzas. Use of elision and metaphor is characteristic of the form. Forms of parallelism are common throughout the poem, in that certain lines have similar grammatical structures and they sometimes have reversed word orders. Each line has three feet with a tone pattern of even-uneven-even.