Ballad

It is a folk song or orally transmitted poem telling in a direct and dramatic manner some
popular story usually derived from a tragic incident in local history or legend. The story is
told simply, impersonally, and often with vivid dialogue. Ballads are normally composed
in * QUATRAINS with alternating four-stress and three-stress lines, the second and
fourth lines rhyming (ABCB) but some ballads are in *COUPLET form, and some others
have six-line *STANZAS. Ballads have been generally classified into three major groups:
traditional, broadside and literary.

A broadside ballad is a ballad that was printed on one side of a single sheet (called a
"broadside"), dealt with a current event or person or issue, and was sung to a well-known
tune. Beginning with the sixteenth century, these broadsides were hawked in the streets
or at country fairs in Great Britain.

Literary ballad is a narrative poem written in deliberate imitation of the form, language,
and spirit of the traditional ballad.

Examples of this “literary” ballad form include John Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci,”
Coleridge’s “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” Thomas Hardy’s “During Wind and Rain,”
and Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee.”