Narrative

"Incident in a Rose Garden" is a dramatized narrative poem. Narrative poems are stories, with characters, a plot, and action, as opposed to lyric poems, which are the utterance of one speaker, often describing or explaining an emotion or thought. This poem is all dialogue and is presented from an objective point of view. This means that the narrator never intrudes to comment on the action or to explain or describe what is happening. In this way, the poem resembles a very short play. Readers have to infer from the dialogue the theme of the story. The organization of the poem into three-line stanzas, whose lines have three beats apiece, makes the work look and sound like a poem.

Personification

When ideas or inanimate things are given human qualities, they are personified. Justice personifies death by drawing on traditional depictions of death and by packing his description with...