POEM#2: The Ballad

The ballad is a form built out of 4 line stanzas with a recognizable rhythm (most often iambic trimeter, da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM or iambic tetrameter da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM). Ballads are most often rhymed ABAB (Amazing Grace) or ABCB (The Beatles’ “Let it be”) or many many blues songs. The form is an old folk song invention, still used in much popular music (check out nearly any really singable pop song on the radio... you’ll be surprised, I think). The ballad can carry story and narrative easily, but it also lends itself (perhaps because of its ubiquity in American hymnals) to meditation. William Blake’s ballads seem like children’s poems, but that belies the sometimes dark and/or revolutionary ideas encoded within them. Emily Dickinson uses odd syntax, slant rhyme, and ambiguous punctuation and capitalization to make each of her ballads capable of holding mystery, reverberating with it even.

The ballad form can read like Dr. Seuss, and many of you will find it quite easy to pen a stanza or two of what used to be called doggerel (look it up)—the trick is to see what ELSE this stanza (often called “common verse”) can do. Can you stretch it to make it uncommon? Or at least uncommonly good? Can you present four lines (or any multiple of four, let’s say 12 lines minimum… though that can be one poem or 3) that do not have the reader trotting through your poem as if on a pony (called macaroni)? Get a few lines onto paper, then play with the rhythm and rhyme, trying NOT to let your reader know exactly what is coming next. There’s the rub: how to bend the expectation in the most predictable and familiar poetic form in America. Hmn... Good luck.

ED (340)

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro

Kept treading – treading – till it seemed

That Sense was breaking through –  

And when they all were seated,

A Service, like a Drum –  

Kept beating – beating – till I thought

My Mind was going numb –  

And then I heard them lift a Box

And creak across my Soul

With those same Boots of Lead, again,

Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race

Wrecked, solitary, here – 

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down –  

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing – then – 

  

ED (905)

Split the Lark—and you'll find the Music—

Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled—

Scantily dealt to the Summer Morning

Saved for your Ear when Lutes be old.

Loose the Flood—you shall find it patent—

Gush after Gush, reserved for you—

Scarlet Experiment! Sceptic Thomas!

Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?

The Sick Rose by William Blake

O Rose thou art sick. 

The invisible worm, 

That flies in the night 

In the howling storm: 

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.