The Quiescent Ferry is a poetic riddle intended to complain about alcoholic beverages, 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. Use of simile is characteristic of the form. Forms of parallelism are common throughout the poem, in that certain lines often contrast underlying meaning and they sometimes have reversed word orders. Each line has fourteen syllables. The third line of the tercet uses the same placement of allusions as the second line. The first line must make use of vivid imagery.