informal talk about forms: the ballad

by Tom Adam

Aside from Christine’s excellent post on Shakespearean Sonnets, there hasn’t been much written here about metrically formal poetry. There are a couple of reasons, one being that I wanted to write a piece on meter before I started writing about verse forms that use it, and another is that I rarely write in meter. It’s hard having to sculpt the lines to use the words you want to use in a fairly normal syntax while following the dictates of a meter.

Yet for a very long time English and European verse cleaved to meter as fundamental to the art of poetry, and a lot of that was probably due to the influence of song and music on poetry. The ballad is an excellent example of this effect. (Note: the ballade is something totally different.)

First, the mechanics of the form:

• Ballads are written in quatrains (four line verses).
• Each Quatrain is written in ballad meter, A more specific form of Common Meter. The meter of the poem is iambic with the first and third lines having four beats and the second and fourth having three beats. This results in alternating lines of Iambic Tetrameter and Iambic Trimeter.
• The second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme. Sometimes, the first and third do as well. Each Stanza is its own unit, with no need to keep rhyme throughout the poem. The rhyme scheme is then abcb or abab.

But the mechanics don’t capture the essence of the Ballad. Ballads are about telling stories.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci
by John Keats

O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.

II.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms!
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.

III.
I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

IV.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful — a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

V.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look’d at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

VI.
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

VII.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said —
“I love thee true.”

VIII.
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept, and sigh’d fill sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

IX.
And there she lulled me asleep,
And there I dream’d — Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream’d
On the cold hill’s side.

X.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried — “La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!”

XI.
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

XII.
And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.

While people debate about the meaning behind this poem, it is a story about a Knight and a Fairy.

Some key notes about this work of Keat’s, emblematic of the Ballad, are:

• Most of the poem is in the form of narration. The first three stanzas are written from the perspective of the Fairy and the remainder from the perspective of the Knight. Though ballads need not be entirely narrated, the use of speech is very common.
• It’s kind of dark. There are a lot of images associated with death. For whatever reason, most ballads are dark. Demons and fairies and death are common topics.
• There is the use of repetition. “On the cold hill’s side,” “And no birds sing,” both close two stanzas, and the first two stanzas begin with the same line. This is indicative of the oral tradition: the repetition of lines and words keeps the story more contained. Some ballads repeat entire stanzas as a chorus.

Of course, these rules are just tradition. Strong tradition in the case of using iambic meter and rhyme, but still only tradition. It’s important to always feel free to take these forms and change them to suit your needs. Keats certainly did, changing elements of rhythm, and you can too. It’s about telling the story the way you want to tell it.

Learn more at La Belle Dame Sans Merci on Bartleby and Wikipedia and The Poetry Foundation’s page of Ballads.