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[Coop and Dino singing]

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Poetry can do a great many things. It can express anger, address current events, [Person reading text message]

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talk about nature, or confess one's love – for another person or for a slice of cake.

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But it can also be used to tell a story.

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And when it does that, we call it “Narrative Poetry.”

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Narrative poetry is kind of like a short story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. [Coop discussing narrative poetry]

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The only difference is that, unlike a regular story, a narrative poem is written, well…

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poetically.

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It could be a made-up story, or a story that really happened. It could be a big, crazy

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story about a dragon and a princess, or a tiny, simple story about how you fell and [Person holding book about how a man scraped his knee]

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scraped your knee.

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The nice thing about narrative poetry is that it can be written about anything at all.

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Narrative poems don't have to follow a ton of rules – so long as they tell a story,

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that's good enough. [Mother reading daughter a story in bed]

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However, they do often rhyme in rhyming couplets because… really, who doesn't love a good

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rhyming poem?

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One famous example of a narrative poem is called “Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Lawrence [Ernest stood by a typewriter]

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Thayer. Here’s a taste:

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“The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day:

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The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play,

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And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,

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A pall-like silence fell upon the patrons of the game.

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A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest

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Clung to the hope which springs eternal in the human breast;

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They thought, “If only Case could but get a whack at that -

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We'd put up even money now, with Casey at the bat.”

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As we can see, this is clearly a narrative poem, because not only does it rhyme, but [Person holding a narrative poem]

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more importantly, it tells the story about a baseball team trying to win their game…

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…and this Casey guy, who sounds like a total stud. [Baseball lands on car]

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Of course, the author could have just written the story without doing it poetically, but

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making it rhyme, and writing it this way, makes it that much more fun to read.

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Of course, just now we only read the first two stanzas – remember, that's a grouping [Coop discussing stanzas]

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of verses that rhymes…

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…so if you want to know what happened to Casey's team, you can read the rest of the

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poem on our website.

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Spoiler Alert: we wouldn’t actually put any money on this game if we were you.

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