Ballad

To convey that sense of emotional urgency, the ballad is often constructed in quatrain stanzas, each line containing as few as three or four stresses and rhyming either the second and fourth lines, or all alternating lines.

from poets.org

However, the form evolved into a writer’s sport. Nineteenth-century poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge andWilliam Wordsworth wrote numerous ballads. Coleridge’s“Rime of the Ancient Mariner," the tale of a cursed sailor aboard a storm-tossed ship, is one of the English language’s most revered ballads. It begins:

It is an ancient mariner

And he stoppeth one of three.

—“By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

Now wherefore stoppest thou me?

The bridegroom’s doors are opened wide,

And I am next of kin;

The guests are met, the feast is set:

Mayst hear the merry din.”

He holds him with his skinny hand,

“There was a ship," quoth he.

“Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!”

Eftsoons his hand dropped he.

He holds him with his glittering eye—

The wedding-guest stood still,

And listens like a three-years’ child:

The mariner hath his will.

Other balladeers, including Thomas Percy and, later, W. B. Yeats, contributed to the English tradition. In America, the ballad evolved into folk songs such as “Casey Jones," the cowboy favorite “Streets of Laredo," and “John Henry.”

Definition: a narrative poem usually relating one single, dramatic event.

Two forms of the ballad are often distinguished as

the folk ballad
the literary ballad

Ballad

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