Very well-known in fiction, many poems also employ this two-part structure which turns from telling a story to offering the lesson(s) of that story.
“Reading,” by Michael Fried (in The Next Bend in the Road, p. 35).
“Allowables,” by Nikki Giovanni
“Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes,” by Thomas Gray
“Evolution,” by Eliza Griswold (in Wideawake Field (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007): 66).
“The Epileptic,” by Jon Loomis (in Vanitas Motel (Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College Press, 1998): 18-19).
“John Chapman,” by Mary Oliver (in American Primitive (New York: Little Brown & Co., 1984); reprinted in Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems, edited by Joy Katz and Kevin Prufer (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 2007): 124-25).
“Scary, No Scary,” by Zachary Schomburg Word to the wise.
“The Demise of Camembert,” by Ron Slate
“Fairy-tale Logic,” by A.E. Stallings
Here are some stories that refuse a moral:
“Bent to the Earth,” by Blas Manuel de Luna
“Two Trees,” by Don Paterson (in Rain (New York: FSG, 2009): 3). Paterson reads “Two Trees” here.
[…] room…,” the asserted beauty shifts into a kind of emblem’s meditation or moral. The poem, however, is unwilling to rest content here, and challenges its own conclusions, […]