How can you tell if a poem is a ballad?
In its simplest definition, a ballad is a poem or song that tells a story. Many ballads were passed down through oral tradition and recount a dramatic event, such as a famous battle, the wreck of a ship, or the tragic death of a child or lover. In the English language, many ballads follow a specific form, but there are variations.
Traditional ballads
Traditionally, a poem or song is a ballad if it features rhyme and is composed of stanzas of four lines each (quatrains). The rhyme scheme is typically abcb, which means the second and fourth lines end in the same rhyme (b). In addition, lines in the stanzas usually alternate between lines of four stresses and three stresses, which defines the ballad’s particular rhythmic pattern, or meter. This may seem very complicated when described, but in practice the form sounds very familiar to the ear. A classic example is the first stanza of the ballad “The Wife of Usher’s Well”:
There lived a wife at Usher’s Well,
And a wealthy wife was she;
She had three stout and stalwart sons,
And sent them o’er the sea.
The folk song “Barbara Allen” is another typical example. In the song Barbara cruelly spurns her lover because of an unintentional slight; he dies of lovesickness, she of remorse.
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Variations in form and narrative
However, many poets, bards, and troubadours experimented with form to create ballads featuring more than four lines in a stanza and different rhyme schemes or meters. For example, Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee” has stanzas of six, seven, and eight lines. Its rhyme scheme also varies throughout the poem. The first two stanzas are:
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea:
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
Notice that while the first stanza’s rhyme scheme is ababcb, the second stanza has an entirely different scheme: abcbdb. In his poem “The Raven,” Poe experimented with the ballad form even further, using six-line stanzas, the rhyme scheme abcbbb, and a complex metrical pattern in terms of line length and stressed syllables.
Another common variation is that not all ballads tell a story. They may use the traditional ballad form to describe a person or a feeling, and they may do it very effectively, but they lack a narrative structure. For example, Robert Burns’s poem “A Red, Red Rose” mainly describes the “bonnie lass” he loves:
O my luve’s like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly played in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.
The poem continues with more verses about Burns’s steadfast love, but beyond that, nothing really happens. Yet it can be reasonably classified as a ballad because of its similar structure: quatrains, an abab or abcb rhyme scheme, and alternating lines of four and three stresses.
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Like Burns, Emily Dickinson did not write story poems. Rather, she wrote lyric poems that expressed her intense personal emotions and thoughts—but her common choice of meter was similar to that of the ballad. In her poem “Because I could not stop for Death,” she wrote in quatrains with lines alternating between four and three stresses.
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
List of famous ballads
The following are some notable poems and songs that are also ballads.
- “Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Lawrence Thayer
- “Saturday’s Child” by Countee Cullen
- “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot
