The Ashen Fate is a poetic riddle intended to praise death, originating in The Confederacy of Abbeys. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is a single couplet. Use of assonance is characteristic of the form. Forms of parallelism are common throughout the poem, in that certain lines often share an underlying meaning and they often contrast underlying meaning. The ending of each line of the poem shares the same rhyme. The first line has five feet with a tone pattern of uneven-uneven. The second line has five feet with a tone pattern of uneven-even.