The Saffron of Scholars is a dramatic poetic form intended to express grief over a chosen subject, originating in The Lantern of Nails. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is a single quatrain. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines often contrast underlying meaning. Each line has five feet with a syllable weight pattern of long-short-long (quantitative cretic pentameter). The fourth line of the quatrain must expand the idea of the first line.