The Understanding Trance is a dramatic poetic form intended to describe inspiration, originating in The Spine of Hives. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is three to four couplets. 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 often contrast underlying meaning. The ending of each line of the poem shares the same rhyme.