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The ballad form is often used to tell a story: a tragic love story, for instance, or else a tale of adventure and high romance. Often they contain dialogue spoken by one or more of the characters who feature in these narrative poems, and the final stanza often echoes the first, so there’s a cyclical feel to the poem.
- Ballad Definition
- Ballad Examples
- Why Do Writers Choose to Write Ballads?
- Other Helpful Ballad Resources
What is a ballad? Here’s a quick and simple definition: Some additional key details about ballads: 1. The ballad is one of the oldest poetic forms in English. 2. There are so many different types of ballad that giving one strict definition to fit all the variations would be nearly impossible. The simplest way to think of a ballad is as a song or po...
The following examples of ballads show several types of variations of the form. To help highlight the structure of each example, we've highlighted all "A" rhymes in green, "B" rhymes in red, and "C" rhymes in yellow.
As the ballad has undergone major shifts in form and content throughout its centuries-long history, the answer to why poets write ballads question differs, primarily based on the era in which a ballad was written. Folk ballads—the oldest form of ballad—were generally transmitted orally, so the repetitive form of the ballad was helpful for memorizat...
- “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,” starts with an elderly sailor stopping a man on the way to a wedding.
- “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe weaves the tale of the lovely Annabel Lee. This love song is tragic 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.
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The form of ballads, their meaning, and subject matter have changed over time. Ultimately, as a form of narrative verse, most ballads are associated with some aspect of telling a story. Here are some common examples of subject matter found in a ballad: tragic romance. reimagination of legends.
IV. Examples of Ballads in Literature Example 1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one of the best examples of a ballad. The poem is very strictly structured in terms of meter and rhyme, and tells a story of an old sailor who stops people on their way into a party.
Ballad Definition. Ballad (BAH-lihd) poetry is a type of narrative poetry that is written to be sung. It’s a story that can be set to music, so some sort of rhythm or musicality is required. These are the only two absolute qualifications.
Examples include Queen’s We Are the Champions, Foreigner’s I Want to Know What Love Is and More Than a Feeling by Boston. More recently, you could categorize songs like All of Me by John Legend and Stay With Me by Sam Smith as ballads.
