Poems, Drama & Prose
Explain major differences between poems, drama, and prose, identifying structural elements unique to each form: verse, rhythm, and meter in poetry; cast of characters, dialogue, and stage directions in drama; chapters and paragraphs in prose
What a learner can do afterwards
- Compare a poem, a play script, and a prose passage on a similar theme, identifying the structural features unique to each form (e.g. stanzas vs scenes vs chapters)
- Identify and explain the function of structural elements in drama: cast list, stage directions (in italics or brackets), dialogue format, and scene divisions
- Describe how structural elements of poetry such as verse, rhythm, meter, and line breaks affect how a poem is read aloud and how meaning is conveyed
1 · Read
You already know that poems have stanzas and lines, and dramas have scenes and dialogue. Now let's use that knowledge to tell the three forms apart just by looking at the page. A poem, a play, and a story about the same topic can look completely different, even before you read a single word.
Look at the start of a play script: a cast list names every character, then the story unfolds through stage directions and dialogue.
All three forms can have people talking, but the talking is set out differently. A play puts the speaker's name in front of the line, like MO: I found it. There are no quotation marks. Prose keeps the speech inside quotation marks in a paragraph, like "I found it," said Mo. A stage direction is neither of those. It is an instruction for the actors, often set apart in brackets or italics, so nobody says it out loud.
Watch out for look-alikes. Chopping words into short lines does not make a poem on its own. A poem groups its lines into stanzas and keeps a beat, and it often rhymes at the ends of lines. Talking on its own does not make a play either. A story stays prose when the talking sits in quotation marks inside its paragraphs, and a poem can hold talking inside its lines too.
You can often name the form before you read a single word, just from the shape of the page. A poem sits in short lines gathered into stanzas, with blank space between them. A play puts a character's name in front of each spoken line and sets its stage directions apart. Prose runs in full paragraphs, and long prose gathers those paragraphs into chapters. Chapters belong to prose alone, so a page divided into chapters is never a poem.
Poems break into stanzas and lines, plays break into scenes with stage directions and dialogue, and prose flows in paragraphs and chapters.
2 · Watch
Take it off screen
Where it sits
Where this leads
24 questions wait behind this lesson, each with its answer explained. Every answer feeds the sky: stars light as they are learned, and dim when it is time to come back.