The Poetic Reason is a poetic riddle, originating in The Unbridled Dale. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is a single couplet. The Poetic Reason is always written from the perspective of a fictional poet. Use of vivid imagery is characteristic of the form. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines sometimes have reversed word orders. Each line has eight syllables. Every line of the poem has a medial caesura. The second line of the couplet shares the underlying meaning of the first line. The first line is intended to describe the past. The second line is intended to reflect on previous ideas concerning the future.