The Tress of Silkiness is a dramatic poetic form intended to praise a chosen subject which grew out of the performances of The Heroic Waxes. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is divided into an octet and a line. Use of assonance is characteristic of the form. Forms of parallelism are common throughout the poem, in that certain lines are required to maintain phrasing and they reverse grammatical structures. Each line has nine syllables.