Poems and plays: reading the shape

Word	What it means
Speaker	The voice in a poem — a character the poet created, unless the poem gives you reason to think otherwise.
Stanza	A group of lines with a space before and after: a poem's paragraph.
Rhyme scheme	The pattern of rhyming line endings, marked with letters: abab, aabb.
Free verse	Poetry with no regular rhyme or rhythm, shaped by line breaks and sound instead.
Alliteration	The same consonant sound at the start of nearby words.
Onomatopoeia	A word that sounds like what it names: hiss, thud, tick.
Imagery	Language that appeals to the senses.
Enjambment	A sentence running on past the end of a line without a pause.
End-stopped line	A line that ends with punctuation and a pause.
Caesura	A pause in the middle of a line.
Stage direction	An instruction in a script, usually in brackets or italics, saying how a line is spoken, what a character does, or what the stage looks like.

The hail came hammering, hard on the hood,
then tick, then tick, then nothing.

A model reading. The first line repeats a heavy h — hail, hammering, hard, hood — so it pounds the way hail does. The second shrinks to one small word, tick, which sounds like what it names, repeated and spaced out, then stops on nothing. Read aloud, the lines do what they describe: the storm passes and you hear it go.

The sentence that earns the mark names the device and what it matches: “The alliteration of hard h sounds imitates the pounding hail, and the repeated tick slows the line until it falls silent.”

My brother's room is a museum now.
His trophies stand guard on the shelf.
Mom dusts them every Sunday
and never
moves
the bed.

• Speaker: a younger sibling watching a parent — not necessarily the poet.
• Imagery: a museum keeps things exactly as they were, and nobody lives in one. Stand guard gives the trophies a job: protecting the room from change.
• Form: three ordinary lines, then lines of one or two words that slow you down to the one thing Mom will not do.
• Together: the brother is gone, and his mother is not ready to accept it. The poem never says so. The broken lines do.

MAYA: (not looking up from her phone) I said I'm fine.
DAD: You've said that three times.
MAYA: (sets the phone face down) Then it must be true.
(A long pause. DAD sits down beside her.)

• The first direction shows Maya avoiding her father. Her words say “fine”; her eyes say “leave me alone”.
• The second direction is the turn. Putting the phone face down means she is paying attention now, and her line says the opposite of what she means: she knows saying it three times does not make it true.
• The pause and Dad sitting down show he has understood, and chosen to stay rather than argue.

None of that is in the dialogue alone. A question about a stage direction is asking what it shows that the words do not.

• Assuming the speaker is the poet.
• Naming a sound device without saying what it matches in the meaning.
• Reading line by line and missing where the sentence actually ends.
• Hunting for rhyme in free verse instead of looking at the line breaks.
• Skipping the stage directions.