The Pensive Forethought is a dramatic poetic form, originating in The Mighty Flags. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is a single tercet. Forms of parallelism are common throughout the poem, in that certain lines are required to maintain phrasing, they have similar grammatical structures and they reverse grammatical structures. Each line has five syllables. Every line of the poem has a terminal caesura. The second line of the tercet must expand the idea of the first line. The first line is intended to describe the past. The second line is intended to offer a different perspective concerning current events. The third line is intended to develop the previous idea concerning the future.