The Watchful Genius is a poetic riddle which grew out of the performances of The Exaltation of Basins. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is divided into six septets and a series of quatrains. Use of elision and metaphor is characteristic of the form. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines often contrast underlying meaning. Each line has eight syllables.