The Structures of Poems and Plays

1. Hold up the three versions of "Rufus Comes Home" from across the room, one at a time. Ask students to name each form — poem, play or story — from its shape alone.
2. Ask what on the page gave it away. Write their answers on the board: short lines and gaps between groups (poem); names in capitals followed by speech, words in parentheses (play); full sentences filling the page in paragraphs (prose).
3. Say that every one of those shapes is doing a job, and today is about naming the jobs.

1. Read the play aloud: "CAST: MIA, age 9. DAD. RUFUS, a dog. SETTING: A porch at dusk. Rain. A LOST DOG poster is taped to the door. MIA: (pressing her face to the window) Dad. Dad! The gate! DAD: (not looking up from his phone) It's just the wind, Mia. (RUFUS trots onto the porch and shakes himself hard.) MIA: (flinging the door open) RUFUS!"
2. Label with students: the cast list (tells the actors and reader who will appear), the setting (tells the designer what to build), dialogue (the only words the audience hears), stage directions in parentheses (tell actors what to do — never spoken). Ask: "Which words would the audience never hear?" The parentheses.
3. Read the poem aloud, tapping the beat: "The gate swung open in the rain, / a muddy shape came up the lane — / one ear up and one ear down, / the bravest dog in all the town. // We'd searched the park, we'd searched the shore, / we'd taped his face on every door. / Now Rufus shook from head to tail / and soaked the porch, the mat, the mail." Label: each line is a verse; each group of four is a stanza; rain/lane, down/town are rhymes; the steady da-DUM beat is the rhythm, also called meter.
4. Read the prose: "Mia had stopped watching the gate three days ago, but her chest still jumped every time it rattled. When it swung open and a muddy shape came through, she did not believe it until the dog was on the porch, shaking rain over everything."
5. Compare the same moment. Prose can get inside a head directly: "her chest still jumped," "she did not believe it." The play cannot say what Mia feels; it must show it with a stage direction: "pressing her face to the window." But the play shows two things at once — Mia sees, Dad does not look up — which a stage does in a single moment. The poem squeezes the whole search into two lines and makes it sound like a song you could clap to.
6. Write the rule on the board: "Prose tells the inside. Plays show the outside. Poems make it sound."

“Same moment, three forms. Each one can do something the others cannot. When you name an element, always say what job it is doing.”

1. Pairs use three highlighter colors to label every structural element on all three versions, writing the element's job in the margin beside it — for example, "(not looking up from his phone) — stage direction: tells the actor how Dad ignores her."
2. Pairs choose one moment — the dog shaking off the rain — and decide which form handles it best.
3. They must justify using an element, not a preference: "The poem, because the rhyme on tail/mail makes the soaking funny" or "The play, because the stage direction lets the audience see it happen" — not "The poem, because I like poems."

“I don't want to know which one you like. I want to know which element does the job best.”

1. Students complete the text-structure page. Extracts from all three forms are printed on the sheet.
2. For every element they name, they must write what it does in five words or more.

1. Ask: "Name one element of a play and its job." Then: "Name one thing the prose told us that the play could not." Fish for "her chest still jumped."