The Learning of Lessons is a poetic form intended to amuse the audience, originating in The Hale Field. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is a single tercet. Use of consonance and metaphor is characteristic of the form. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines often contrast underlying meaning. Each line has four syllables. Every line of the poem has a terminal caesura. The first line concerns the past. The second line concerns current events. The third line concerns the future.