The manuscript presents a continuous poem, but the material inside it does not behave as one. There is a long stretch of practical counsel about guests, hospitality, drink, friendship, wealth and reputation, in a plain proverbial voice. There is a passage of bitter reflection on being deceived by a woman and another on Odin's own deception in obtaining the mead of poetry. There is a set of counsels addressed to a named listener, marked off by a repeated formula. And there is the account of the tree and the runes, followed by a list of charms.
Scholars have divided this into constituent poems in various ways, and no division is agreed. What is agreed is that the sections differ in metre, in voice and in outlook, and that a compiler joined them, probably attracted by the fact that all of them could be presented as the speech of Odin. The gnomic sections are the part most often quoted and the part least like religion. They advise moderation in drink, caution with strangers, keeping one's own counsel, giving gifts to keep a friendship in repair, and not outstaying a welcome, and they end by praising reputation after death as the one thing that never perishes. That is a worldly ethic concerned with how to survive among people, recorded in a mythological frame and attributed to a god, and its tone is closer to a book of proverbs than to anything cultic.