The Cardinal Sweetness is a ribald poetic form intended to express pleasure with a chosen subject, originating in The Contested Storm. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is divided into three distinct parts: a couplet, a line and another two to three couplets. Use of consonance is characteristic of the form. Forms of parallelism are common throughout the poem, in that certain lines often contrast underlying meaning and they sometimes have reversed word orders. Each line has six syllables.