The Sports of Beginning is a solemn poetic form concerning immortality, originating in The Humid Volcano. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is five tercets. Use of consonance is characteristic of the form. Forms of parallelism are common throughout the poem, in that certain lines are required to maintain phrasing and they sometimes have reversed word orders. Each line has four feet with an accent pattern of unstressed-unstressed-stressed (qualitative anapaestic tetrameter). Every line of the poem has a terminal caesura. The ending of each line of the poem shares the same rhyme. The third line of each tercet contrasts the underlying meaning of the second line.