The Shingle of Fishing is a poetic riddle intended to amuse the audience concerning family, originating in The New Pick. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is a single line. Use of alliteration, assonance, ambiguity and symbolism is characteristic of the form. The poem has five feet with a syllable weight pattern of short-short-long (quantitative anapaestic pentameter).