The Mountainous Winter is a poetic riddle intended to beseech Acithi the Summer of Flowers originally devised by the elf Ametha Gorgedells. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is three sexains. Use of assonance, consonance, simile, vivid imagery and juxtaposition is characteristic of the form. Forms of parallelism are common throughout the poem, in that certain lines have similar grammatical structures and they use the same placement of allusions. Each line has eight syllables. The second line of each sexain must expand the idea of the first line.