Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

Ballad

Definitions

• ballad (Merriam-Webster)
  1 a: a narrative composition in rhythmic verse suitable for singing  b: an art song accompanying a traditional ballad
  2: a simple song: air
  3:  a popular song; especially: a slow romantic or sentimental song
• ballad (Oxford Dictionaries)
  1 A poem or song narrating a story in short stanzas. Traditional ballads are typically of unknown authorship, having been passed on orally from one generation to the next.
  2 A slow sentimental or romantic song.
• ballad (Chris Baldick, The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 32)
  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; but some ballads are in couplet form, and some others have six-line stanzas. Appearing in many parts of Europe in the late Middle Ages, ballads flourished particularly strongly in Scotland from the 15th century onward. Since the 18th century, educated poets outside the folk-song tradition—notably Coleridge and Goethe—have written imitations of the popular ballad's form and style: Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner' (1798) is a celebrated example.
• ballad (M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 25)
  A short definition of the popular ballad (also called the folk ballad or traditional ballad) is that it is a song, transmitted orally, which tells a story. Ballads are thus the narrative species of folk songs, which originate, and are communicated orally, among illiterate or only partly literate people. In all probability the initial version of a ballad was composed by a single author, but he or she is unknown; and since each singer who learns and repeats an oral ballad is apt to introduce changes in both the text and the tune, it exists in many variant forms. Typically, the popular ballad is dramatic, condensed, and impersonal: the narrator begins with teh climactic episode, tells the story tersely in action and dialogue (sometimes by means of dialogue alone), and tells it without self-reference or the expression of personal attitudes or feelings.

Ballad Stanzas

Quatrain

Introduction

Goethe, who saw so many things with such clearness of vision, brought out the charm of the popular ballad for readers of a later day in his remark that the value of these songs of the people is to be found in the fact that their motives are drawn directly from nature; and he added, that in the art of saying things compactly, uneducated men have greater skill than those who are educated. [...] No other form of verse has, therefore, in so great a degree, the charm of freshness. In material, treatment, and spirit, these ballads are set in sharp contrast with the poetry of [end of page 7] the hour. They deal with historical events or incidents, with local traditions, with personal adventure or achievement. They are, almost without exception, entirely objective.

—Hamilton W. Mabie, "Introduction," A Book of Old English Ballads (New York: Macmillan, 1896): 7–28.

Vocabulary

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Last updated November 15, 2016