Riddle
Quick answer: A riddle is a poem that describes its subject in deliberately puzzling terms and asks the reader to guess it. Learn the form's history and how to write one.
A riddle is a short poem that describes something in deliberately indirect, puzzling language and challenges the reader to name it. The subject speaks in disguise: an everyday object presents itself through strange comparisons, paradoxes and half-truths, and the poem is only complete when the reader supplies the answer. It is one of the oldest verse games in any language.
Poets keep returning to riddles because the form teaches metaphor better than any exercise ever devised. To riddle an onion or a shadow, you must see it freshly enough to describe it without its name, which is precisely the muscle every image in every poem depends on. The riddle also flatters readers by making them collaborators rather than spectators.
How It Works
Most riddles let the subject speak in first person, listing its qualities in ways that mislead and reveal at once. Each clue should be literally true but figuratively surprising. An invented example: I am born in a whisper and die in a room, / I grow when repeated and shrink when confessed. The answer, a secret, fits every claim, yet no single line gives it away.
Good riddles balance fairness and difficulty. Every detail must point to the answer once you know it; nothing should be arbitrary. The classic ending is a direct challenge, the old Anglo-Saxon formula being some version of say what I am called.
Where You Will See It
The Exeter Book, a tenth-century manuscript, preserves nearly a hundred Old English riddles on subjects from swans to storms, some solemn and some cheerfully rude. Riddles run through folklore worldwide, from the Sphinx's deadly question in the Oedipus story to the riddle contests of Norse myth. In modern poetry, Sylvia Plath's Metaphors is a nine-line riddle whose answer is pregnancy, and Emily Dickinson wrote many poems that behave like riddles, withholding their subject to the last breath or beyond.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Pick a humble subject, the humbler the better: a key, a scar, a kettle. List ten true facts about it, then translate each fact into an image that never uses the obvious vocabulary. Keep the best four or five. Even if you never write a riddle to publish, the drill sharpens every metaphor you make afterwards. Some poets draft a riddle version of a struggling poem just to find out what its subject actually is.
What poets can take from this
- Choose ordinary subjects; the gap between humble thing and strange description is the pleasure.
- Make every clue literally true so the answer clicks rather than shrugs.
- Use first person to give the hidden subject a voice and personality.
- Order clues from most misleading to most revealing to control the reader's journey.
- Test your riddle on a friend; if nobody solves it, soften one clue rather than adding more.
Try it yourself
Write a riddle poem of 6 to 12 lines in the voice of something you touched today without noticing. Make each line truthful, make two lines deliberately misleading, and end with a challenge to the reader.
Questions
What is the difference between a riddle and a metaphor?
A metaphor names both things it connects, calling grief a locked room, for instance. A riddle hides one half of the comparison and makes the reader recover it. In practice a riddle is a sustained metaphor with the subject deleted.
Are riddles a serious poetic form?
Yes. The Exeter Book riddles are canonical Old English poetry, and poets from Dickinson to Plath have used riddle strategies in serious work. The playful surface often carries real subjects such as birth, death and identity.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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