The Lessons of Wisdom is a poetic narrative concerning the future which grew out of the performances of The Teal Tongs. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is divided into an extremely long series of quatrains and a series of thirteen-line stanzas. The Lessons of Wisdom is always written from the perspective of the author. Use of vivid imagery is characteristic of the form. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines often contrast underlying meaning.