The Didactic Idea is a poetic form intended to complain about someone recently deceased, originating in The Heart of Dripping. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is a series of tercets. Use of consonance is characteristic of the form. Forms of parallelism are common throughout the poem, in that certain lines often share an underlying meaning and they reverse grammatical structures. The second line of each tercet presents a different view of the subject of the first line. The rhyme scheme of the poem is ABB. As a rule throughout the poem, the end rhymes don't generally match perfectly.