The Dates of Understanding is a poetic narrative intended to express grief over a chosen subject, originating in The Faded Petticoat. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is four quintains. Forms of parallelism are common throughout the poem, in that certain lines often share an underlying meaning and they sometimes have reversed word orders. Each line has five feet with a tone pattern of even-even-uneven. The third line of each quintain presents a different view of the subject of the first line.