The Mellow Song is a poetic narrative intended to express grief over a chosen subject, originating in The Portals of Strength. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is two septets. Use of vivid imagery 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 five feet with an accent pattern of stressed-stressed (qualitative spondaic pentameter). The seventh line of each septet presents a different view of the subject of the first line. The rhyme scheme of the poem is AABAAAC. As a rule throughout the poem, the end rhymes don't generally match perfectly.