Search results
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.
These literary ballads became crossroads between the oral tradition of folk ballads and modern narrative poems in ballad form. Here are some famous examples of ballads in poetry: John Barleycorn: A Ballad (Robert Burns) The Ballad of the Dark Ladie (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) A Ballad of Burdens (Algernon Charles Swinburne)
If there's one ballad you should read in your lifetime, it's 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' by John Keats. This short, digestible ballad about a knight who is captured by a supernatural woman is widely considered the best ballad of all time, and it is often used to teach people about ballad form. O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a famous epic poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and is an excellent ballad example. The above excerpt is the first stanza of the long poem, and features some key aspects of ballads, such as the four-line quatrain and the rhyme scheme of ABCB. The poem tells the story of an old sailor who has returned from ...
A ballade is a musical verse form that originated in medieval and Renaissance French poetry. These poems use a rhyme scheme of ABABBCBC for the first three stanzas and BCBC in the final stanza. They also use a refrain in the last line of every stanza.
