The Watchful Books is a ribald poetic form, originating in The Hale Field. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is a single tercet. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines have similar grammatical structures. Every line of the poem has a terminal caesura. The second line of the tercet is required to maintain the phrasing of the first line. The third line of the tercet reverses the word order of the first line. The first line is intended to describe the past. It has eleven syllables. The second line is intended to develop the previous idea concerning current events. It has seven syllables. The third line is intended to offer a different perspective concerning the future. It has six syllables.