The best examples of examples of narrative poetry vs. lyric poetry

Before we define anything, let’s stand inside a few poems and feel what they’re doing. The cleanest way to understand examples of narrative poetry vs. lyric poetry is to notice how your brain reacts: do you lean forward asking, “What happens next?” or inward asking, “What does this feel like?”

Think about these narrative pieces:

You’re on a dark road with Robert Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man.” The poem unfolds like a mini–short story: a farm couple, a sick worker who returns to die in the only place he half-believes is home, and a quiet argument about what “home” really means. There’s dialogue, backstory, a clear sequence of events. You’re not just in a mood; you’re following a plot.

Or step into Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” You can almost hear hooves and cannon fire. The poem tracks a disastrous military charge in the Crimean War. There’s a beginning (the order), a middle (the charge), and an end (the losses and the echo of honor). This is a textbook example of narrative poetry because the poem marches forward in time.

Jump to the twenty-first century and you get spoken word epics like many pieces by Sarah Kay or Guillermo Gómez-Peña, where a performance poem tells the story of a neighborhood, a family, or a migration journey. On the page or on stage, they feel like stories in verse, not just snapshots of emotion.

Those are real, modern and classic examples of narrative poetry vs. lyric poetry in action: narrative poems are obsessed with what happens.

Now zoom in: lyric poetry as emotional x‑ray

Lyric poems, by contrast, are like holding an emotional x‑ray up to the light. Instead of asking, “Then what?” you’re asking, “What is this moment made of?”

Take William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” Nothing much happens, technically. The speaker walks, sees daffodils, goes home, remembers them. The real action is interior: the shift from loneliness to quiet joy. This is a clean example of lyric poetry because the poem is less about the walk and more about the feeling the daffodils leave behind.

Or think of Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise.” The poem doesn’t walk you scene by scene through a biography. Instead, it’s a repeated surge of defiance and dignity. The “plot” is emotional: each stanza rises higher in confidence and self-assertion. You’re inside a voice, not watching a storyline.

In recent years, poets like Ada Limón and Ocean Vuong have become some of the best examples of contemporary lyric poets. A poem like Vuong’s “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” bends around self-doubt, tenderness, and memory, but it doesn’t move like a straight narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. It spirals around a feeling.

So if narrative poetry is a movie, lyric poetry is a still frame that somehow contains an entire mood.

Clear, side‑by‑side examples of examples of narrative poetry vs. lyric poetry

To really see the contrast, it helps to hold a few examples of examples of narrative poetry vs. lyric poetry side by side and watch how they behave on the page.

Consider Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” This one is sneaky because it’s drenched in mood, but it’s still narrative. A man, a midnight, a tapping at the door, the arrival of the raven, the slow unraveling of the speaker’s sanity—events clearly unfold in order. You could outline the plot like a short horror story. That makes it one of the best examples of narrative poetry in American literature.

Now place it next to Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror.” Here, the poem is mostly a single extended metaphor: a mirror speaking about what it reflects, and what it means to watch a woman age. There’s a faint sense of time passing, but no real storyline. You’re locked inside a single psychological moment that keeps deepening. That’s lyric.

Another pair:

• Narrative: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge – a sailor tells the eerie, supernatural story of killing an albatross and suffering the consequences. You have a narrator, a curse, a journey, a resolution.
• Lyric: “Harlem” by Langston Hughes – the poem asks what happens to a dream deferred, but doesn’t walk you through a specific character’s life. Instead, you get a series of images and emotional possibilities: does it dry up, fester, explode? That’s lyric thinking—one idea, turned in the light.

These pairs are real examples of examples of narrative poetry vs. lyric poetry that teachers love because you can literally highlight the difference: verbs of action vs. verbs of being, scenes vs. sensations.

How to tell if a poem is narrative or lyric (without memorizing jargon)

You don’t need a textbook definition. Try this quick gut check when you’re reading:

Ask yourself: If I retold this poem to a friend, would I sound like I’m recounting a story or describing a feeling?

If you’d say something like, “So there’s this knight who meets a mysterious woman by a lake…” you’re in narrative territory. That’s the vibe of John Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” You can retell it like a fairy tale.

If instead you’d say, “It’s about what it feels like to be grieving in a crowded city,” you’re probably dealing with lyric. Many poems by Tracy K. Smith and Jericho Brown work this way: you remember the emotional temperature more than the plot.

Other simple signals:

• Narrative poems often have multiple scenes, clear time shifts, or dialogue.
• Lyric poems usually stay in one moment, one place, or one emotional state, even if they mention the past or future.
• Narrative poems often answer, “What happened?”
• Lyric poems answer, “What is it like?”

Once you start looking for these cues, you’ll see more and more examples of narrative poetry vs. lyric poetry hiding in plain sight in anthologies, online magazines, and even in some song lyrics.

Modern trends: how 2024–2025 poets blur the line

If you’ve been reading contemporary poetry in 2024 and 2025, you’ve probably noticed something: a lot of poets are mixing narrative and lyric modes in the same piece.

Spoken word and slam scenes, for instance, are full of poems that tell a story—about a breakup, a protest, a childhood—while also pausing for lyric flights of image and emotion. A performance might follow a chronological arc but keep slipping into lines that feel like pure feeling.

Online journals and MFA programs (you can browse syllabi and resources from places like Harvard’s Poetry resources or the Poetry Foundation) showcase this hybrid style: a poem might open narratively—“When my father left, it was snowing”—and then spend most of its time inside the emotional weather of that moment.

In other words, when we talk about examples of narrative poetry vs. lyric poetry, we’re really looking at two ends of a spectrum. Many of the best examples in recent years sit somewhere in the middle: narrative frame, lyric core.

Concrete modern examples: page, stage, and beyond

To make this less abstract, here are more real examples you can actually look up and study.

Strong narrative-leaning poems (story first, feeling second):

• “The Ballad of Birmingham” by Dudley Randall – retells the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, through the voice of a mother and child. You can trace the sequence of events step by step. This poem is often taught in U.S. schools as a clear example of narrative poetry with historical weight.
• “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks – short, yes, but it sketches a whole arc: young people skipping school, living on the edge, and hinting at an early death. It’s almost a micro-story in verse.
• “Incident” by Countee Cullen – a child visits Baltimore, experiences a racist slur, and that single event becomes the entire memory. It’s narrative because the event is the spine of the poem.

Strong lyric-leaning poems (feeling, image, and voice first):

• “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop – structured as a villanelle, it circles around the feeling of loss, moving from lost keys to lost homes to lost love. There’s a hint of biography, but the poem is really about the emotional practice of losing.
• “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams – famously minimal, it doesn’t tell you what happened. It just holds an image in front of you and asks you to sit with it.
• “Good Bones” by Maggie Smith – often shared online, it doesn’t narrate a long sequence of events. Instead, it captures the emotional tension of wanting to tell your children the world is beautiful while knowing how dark it can be.

These are some of the best examples for students and writers who want to feel how examples of narrative poetry vs. lyric poetry operate in modern English.

Why this distinction matters for your own writing

If you’re writing poetry, understanding the difference between narrative and lyric isn’t about passing a quiz; it’s about choosing the right engine for your poem.

If you’re trying to capture a breakup, you might:

• Write a narrative poem that walks through the night it happened: the restaurant, the conversation, the drive home, the text you didn’t answer.
• Or write a lyric poem that never mentions the restaurant at all, but lives inside the feeling of suddenly sleeping alone, the way the room sounds different.

Both are valid. But if you keep reading examples of narrative poetry vs. lyric poetry, you’ll start to feel which mode your draft is secretly asking for.

Educators often lean on this distinction too. The Library of Congress poetry resources and many university writing centers (like those at Purdue OWL) use narrative vs. lyric examples to help students grasp plot, character, and point of view in poetry, alongside tone and imagery.

Quick FAQ: examples, definitions, and gray areas

Q: Can you give a short example of a narrative poem and a lyric poem side by side?
A: Sure. As a narrative example, think of “Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Lawrence Thayer—it tells the story of a baseball hero’s final at-bat, complete with setup, suspense, and a twist ending. As a lyric example, think of “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” by Emily Dickinson—it doesn’t show a specific event; it personifies hope and explores what it feels like to carry it.

Q: Are song lyrics narrative or lyric poetry?
A: Both show up. Many country songs and folk ballads are narrative (they tell stories of characters and events), while some pop or R&B songs are more lyric, circling a feeling or idea. If you can summarize a song as “it’s about this character who did X, then Y,” it leans narrative. If you summarize it as “it’s about feeling heartbroken in this particular way,” it leans lyric.

Q: Are there examples of poems that are clearly both?
A: Yes. Many modern poems are hybrids. A piece might narrate a bus ride while mostly focusing on the speaker’s thoughts about their mother. You’d see a light storyline, but the real payoff is emotional and reflective. These gray-area poems are good examples of how the old categories of narrative vs. lyric are flexible, not rigid boxes.

Q: Where can I find more examples of narrative poetry vs. lyric poetry to study?
A: The Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets both let you search poems by topic, form, and poet. Many university sites also host curated lists of poems used in literature and creative writing courses.

Q: What’s one practical exercise using examples of narrative poetry vs. lyric poetry?
A: Pick a narrative poem you like and rewrite it as a lyric: strip out the plot and focus only on the emotional core. Then take a lyric poem and imagine the backstory—write a narrative version that shows the events that might have led to that feeling. This exercise forces you to notice what each mode keeps and what it leaves out.

Once you’ve spent time with these real examples, you’ll start hearing the difference everywhere: in classic anthologies, in contemporary journals, and in your own drafts. And that’s the point—examples of narrative poetry vs. lyric poetry aren’t just labels; they’re tools for how you read, write, and shape the stories and feelings you carry.