Responsory: A liturgical poetic form featuring alternating verses sung or recited by different voices, with congregational responses following leader's prompts. Responsory structure creates communal participation and emphasizes dialogue between individual and community. This form demonstrates poetry's role in religious ritual and shows how poetic structure can enable participatory performance. Understanding responsory reveals poetry's social and liturgical functions beyond private reading and shows how formal structures serve communal worship, creating patterns of call and response that unite individual and collective voices.

Responsory alternates between call and response, with answering lines or stanzas replying to initial statements. This liturgical form creates dialogue structure, originally used in religious services.