The Mellow Tulips is a poetic narrative intended to express grief over the future, originating in The Dungeon of Verses. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is a single quintain. Use of internal rhyme is characteristic of the form. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines have similar grammatical structures. Each line has five syllables. The fifth line must make use of metaphor. The rhyme scheme of the poem is ABCCB.