The Saffron Stone is a poetic riddle intended to make an apology concerning the hunt, originating in The Responsible Empires. The form guides poets during improvised performances. The poem is a single quatrain. Use of metaphor and simile is characteristic of the form. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines use the same placement of allusions. Each line has five feet with a tone pattern of uneven-even-even. The second line of the quatrain presents a different view of the subject of the first line. The rhyme scheme of the poem is ABAA.