The Explanatory Brilliance is a poetic narrative intended to teach a moral lesson concerning a historical figure, originating in The Confederacy of Dowels. 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 vivid imagery is characteristic of the form. Forms of parallelism are common throughout the poem, in that certain lines have similar grammatical structures, they sometimes have reversed word orders and they reverse grammatical structures. Each line has five syllables. The ending of each line of the poem shares the same rhyme, though the rhyme at the end of the second line doesn't need to match perfectly. The third line of the tercet contrasts the underlying meaning of the first line. The first line has a medial caesura. The second line has a medial caesura.