Frame narratives, seen in Arabian Nights adaptations, layer tales within a framing device; in poetry, they appear to explore multiple viewpoints, comment on storytelling itself, and build epic scale, enriching metafictional depth and reader engagement.

Frame narrative employs a story-within-a-story structure where an outer narrative encloses one or more inner tales, creating layered temporal and perspectival complexity. This ancient technique appears in works like The Arabian Nights, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Boccaccio's Decameron, where a frame situation motivates embedded storytelling. In poetry, frame narratives allow multiple voices, perspectives, and temporal layers while maintaining structural coherence. Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" uses a wedding guest as frame listener, making readers witnesses to witnessing. The technique enables poets to examine storytelling itself—how tales are transmitted, transformed, and received. Frames can be simple (a speaker recounting an overheard story) or elaborately nested (stories within stories within stories). Modern poets employ frame narratives to explore memory, testimony, and the reliability of narration. Students should analyze the relationship between frame and embedded narratives: do they mirror each other, create ironic contrast, or complicate interpretation? Understanding frame narratives helps readers recognize how poems stage their own telling and question the nature of narrative authority.