The Umber Silver is a poetic narrative intended to renounce mining, originating in The Pink Seduction. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is an extremely long series of quatrains. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines reverse grammatical structures. Each line has five feet with a syllable weight pattern of short-short-long (quantitative anapaestic pentameter). The third line of each quatrain is required to maintain the phrasing of the first line. The second line of each quatrain presents a different view of the subject of the first line. The rhyme scheme of the poem is ABBB.