What is a ballad?

A ballad is a type of poem that was traditionally set to music. The word ‘ballad’ comes from the Latin ‘ballare’ which means to dance – it’s also where the word ‘ballet’ comes from.

Ballads have a long tradition and are still written by poets to this day. Ballads can be based on real-life events (including terrible tragedies), or created purely from the imagination to tell tales of romance, mystery and even magic!

Key learning points

• Find out about the conventions of a ballad.
• Get to grips with trochaic and iambic rhythm.
• Try your hand at constructing your own ballad.

The ballad is one of the oldest forms of poetry in the English language. Across Europe, ballads were sung and performed to ordinary people and noble people alike. People remembered them and passed them on by reciting them to others. In the 15th century ballads began to be written down.

Ballads are associated with music and were passed on by travellers through song, in order to share news and stories orally. The catchy rhythm and rhyme scheme of ballads meant it was easy to remember them, and to pass them on to another village or community.

Ballads were written about many topics. These included sharing real life events and reporting news, the more shocking the better! Sometimes they were political, being rude about leaders and politicians, or campaigning for change. Later ‘literary’ ballads told romantic and supernatural stories with ghosts and visions, often looking back in time to the days of knights and ladies.

The ballad’s form has varied over the years but, generally, ballads tell a story, have a lively rhythm, often repeat key lines and use a rhyme scheme.

Rhyme scheme

• In a ballad, the rhyme scheme is usually ABCB but there are many variations.
• The rhythm comes from how certain words or parts of words are emphasised or stressed on each line.

Narrative form and refrain

The ballad form revolves around a story or narrative and tells the tale from beginning to end. This means that ballads are often quite long as they take the listeners through the entire journey of the story, from setting and character, through the dilemma and on to the conclusion.

Typically, ballads are written in four line stanzas called quatrains but are variations. The stanzas often include, or are followed by, a refrain. A refrain is a line that appears numerous times – like a chorus of a song. Using a refrain helps to emphasise the main moral, message or dramatic moment of the ballad.

Each line of poetry can be measured by looking at the number of stressed syllables and the number of unstressed syllables. A pair of stressed/unstressed syllable is called a ‘foot’. These feet are what gives the poem its rhythm.

In a word like ‘to-day’, we emphasise the second syllable not the first syllable. This is called an iamb. It consists of an unstressed and stressed syllable, in that order – or da-DUM.

If the first syllable is stressed, as for example in ‘ha-ppy’, but not the second, it is called a trochee. A trochee is DUM-da.

How many iambs or trochees should there be in each line of a ballad?

A ballad is traditionally written using three, or four, iambs or trochees in a line.

• Tetrameter – means four iambs or eight syllables in a line. A line containing four iambs or trochees, is called iambic or trochaic tetrameter.
• Trimeter – means three iambs or six syllables in a line. A line containing three iambs or trochees, is called iambic or trochaic trimeter.

Many famous poets have used the ballad form over the years from Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats, to Victorian poets like Christina Rossetti and Oscar Wilde.

La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats (which translates from French into ‘The beautiful lady without pity’) was written in 1819. It uses the ballad form to suggest the story is taking place in an older time period with courtly knights and ladies. It begins:

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol, written in 1897, is not about noble lords or ladies. His ballad looks back to the traditions of murder ballads and political ballads which demanded change. It begins:

He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead

Ballads are still written to this day. They continue to be written about real-life events and many are performed as songs in the music charts.