How to Show, Not Tell in a Poem
Quick answer: Learn how to show, not tell in a poem: swap abstract emotion words for concrete images, actions and sensory detail that let readers feel it themselves.
To show rather than tell in a poem, replace statements of emotion with the concrete details that caused the emotion. Instead of writing 'I was heartbroken', describe the two coffee cups still on the draining board a week after she left. The reader assembles the feeling from the evidence, and a feeling a reader assembles is far stronger than one they are handed.
That said, telling is not a crime. Plenty of great poems make bold abstract statements, but they earn them with imagery first. The real skill is knowing the ratio: mostly shown detail, with the occasional told line landing like a verdict. Beginners usually get the ratio backwards.
Why images beat statements
When you write 'grief is unbearable', the reader nods and moves on. Nothing happened in their head. When you write about a father's reading glasses still folded on the arm of his chair, the reader has to do a small piece of work: they see the glasses, remember the man, and feel the absence. That work is where the emotion happens. Ezra Pound's advice to 'go in fear of abstractions' is a century old and still the most quoted line in poetry workshops, because it keeps being true.
Images also carry more information per word. 'She was poor' tells you one fact. 'She counted out the bus fare in coppers' tells you the same fact plus a scene, a texture and a small humiliation, all in eight words.
A worked example
Take a told line: 'My grandmother worked hard all her life and I miss her.' Everything is named, nothing is seen. Now the shown version: 'Her hands still smelled of onions in the hospice. / She kept asking who was minding the pot.' The labour, the love and the loss are all present, but the poem never names any of them. Notice that the shown version is also more specific to one grandmother, which paradoxically makes it more universal.
When telling is the right move
A poem that is all image and no statement can feel evasive, a slideshow with no voice. Strategic telling works in three places: as a hinge between image clusters, as an opening claim the images then prove, or as a final line that names what the poem has been circling. The told line hits hardest when it is short, plain and rationed to one or two per poem.
Contest judges read for exactly this balance. On Writory's five-criteria scorecard, emotion and language marks tend to drop when a poem announces its feelings instead of staging them, so shown detail is not just an aesthetic preference, it is how poems score.
The revision test
Print your draft and underline every abstract emotion word: love, pain, sorrow, joy, fear, loneliness. For each one, ask what the camera would see. If you can replace the word with a picture, an action or a piece of speech, do it. Keep at most one underlined word in the finished poem, and make sure it sits somewhere it can carry weight.
What poets can take from this
- Underline every abstract emotion word in your draft and try to replace each with something a camera could film.
- Use specific nouns: not 'flowers' but 'dandelions gone to seed'.
- Let objects do the grieving: a shoe, a voicemail, an unwatered plant.
- Ration yourself to one or two told statements per poem and place them where they can land.
- Read the draft aloud and note where you feel nothing; that is usually where you told instead of showed.
Try it yourself
Write a poem about a strong emotion without ever naming it or any of its synonyms. Convey it entirely through one room and the objects in it.
Questions
Is telling ever better than showing in poetry?
Yes, in small doses. A plain declarative line can be devastating after a run of images, and some famous poems open with bold statements. The problem is a poem that only tells, because the reader never gets to feel anything first-hand.
What is an example of show, don't tell?
Telling: 'He was nervous.' Showing: 'He folded the receipt into eighths, then unfolded it again.' The second version lets the reader diagnose the nerves themselves, which makes the moment stick.
Does show, don't tell apply to every kind of poem?
Mostly, but not absolutely. Aphoristic and philosophical poems lean on statement by design. Even there, the memorable ones anchor their claims in at least one concrete image.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.