The Ecru Dyes of Coal is a dramatic poetic form intended to describe jewels which grew out of the performances of The Ochre Keepers. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is eight to nine quatrains. Use of consonance and simile is characteristic of the form. Forms of parallelism are common throughout the poem, in that certain lines use the same placement of allusions and they sometimes have reversed word orders. Each line has three syllables. The rhyme scheme of the poem is ABAB.