A ballad is a type of poem that tells a story and was traditionally set to music. English language ballads are typically composed of four-line stanzas that follow an ABCB rhyme scheme. The ballad is one of the oldest poetic forms in English. There are so many different types of ballad that giving one strict definition to fit all the variations ...
Examples of Ballads in Literature. 1. Muriel Rukeyser, “The Ballad of Orange and Grape”. Activist Muriel Rukeyser wrote this poem about how the inequalities in urban areas can seem senseless to the point of randomness: Most of the windows are boarded up, the rats run out of a sack –. sticking out of the crummy garage.
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Below, we introduce and discuss eight of the finest examples of the ballad in poetry. 1. Anonymous, ‘ The Unquiet Grave ’. For a twelvemonth and a day.’. This is part-ballad, part ghost story, as we find a dead woman speaking from beyond the grave, telling her bereft lover to stop pining for her.
- “La Belle Dame sans Merci” by John Keats. One of the oldest known English ballad poems, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” means “The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy.
- “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The longest poem by Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” tells starts with an elderly sailor stopping a man on the way to a wedding.
- “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe. In a kingdom by the sea, Edgar Allan Poe weaves the tale of the lovely Annabel Lee. This love song is a tragic one, because Annabel Lee dies, leaving behind her lover to mourn her life.
- “A Red, Red Rose” by Robert Burns. This lyrical ballad compares love to a rose, and Bob Dylan once called it his “single biggest inspiration.” Because it has lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter woven throughout, it fits the literary ballad tradition, even though it is not a narrative poem.
As a literary device, a ballad is a narrative poem, typically consisting of a series of four-line stanzas. Ballads were originally sung or recited as an oral tradition among rural societies and were often anonymous retellings of local legends and stories by wandering minstrels in the Middle Ages. These traditional or “folk” ballads are ...
Form and Structure. “The Man from Snowy River” is one of the best examples of “bush ballad ”, a style of poetry that depicts the life, character, and scenery of the Australian bush. In the poem, the poet describes the story of the man who captures a colt from the mountain, in thirteen stanzas. The poem follows a regular structure and ...