Module 7

Recognizing the Characteristic of Ballads

NARRATIVE POETRY
Narrative poetry tells a story. Story telling in
verse began as an oral rather than a literary form.
It was spoken or sung by a poet or bard, and it
was heard by a live audience.
THREE TYPES OF BALLADS
1. Traditional ballad is folk art, and older in origin than the other two.
The authors of traditional ballads are unknown, since they were oral
in origin; A short narrative song preserved and transmitted orally
among illiterate or semiliterate people’. In the British Isles the folk
ballad is medieval in origin; and it flourished into the 16th and 17th
centuries.
2. Broadside ballad was printed on a sheet of paper known as a
broadside, and it refers to ballads which were sold on the streets and
at county fairs in Britain from 16- 20th centuries. They were sung to
well-known tunes and often dealt with current events, issues or
scandals
3. Literary Ballad- the most recent of the three, is
written by educated poets in imitation of the form and
style of the popular ballad.
CHARACTERISTICS OF BALLADS
A. Simple language: Some ballads, especially older traditional ballads,
were composed for audiences of non- specialist hearers or (later)
readers. Therefore, they feature language that people can understand
without specialist training or repeated readings.
B. Stories: Ballads tend to be narrative poems, poems that tell stories, as
opposed to lyric poems, which emphasize the emotions of the speaker.
C. Ballad stanzas: The traditional ballad stanza consists of four lines,
rhymed ABCB (or sometimes ABAB -the key is that the second and
fourth lines rhyme). The first and third lines have four stresses, while
the second and fourth have three.
D. Repetition: A ballad often has a refrain, a repeated
section that divides segments of the story. Many
ballads also employ incremental repetition, in which a
phrase recurs with minor differences as the story
progresses. For a classic example of incremental
repetition, see the first two lines of each stanza in "Lord
Randal."
E. Dialogue: As you might expect in a narrative genre, ballads
often incorporate multiple characters into their stories. Often,
since changes of voice were communicated orally, written
transcriptions of oral ballads give little or no indication that
the speaker has changed. Writers of literary ballads, the later
poems that imitate oral ballads, sometimes play with this
convention.
F. Third-person objective narration: Ballad
narrators usually do not speak in the first person
(unless speaking as a character in the story), and
they often do not comment on their reactions to
the emotional content of the ballad.
WHAT IS IMAGERY?
It is creating a picture in the reader’s mind by making
the reader see, hear, taste, smell, or touch what is
being described. It is a use of vivid descriptions in order
to explain a situation to a reader or listener. It is a way
of building a picture or ‘image” in the mind so that the
audience can gain a greater understanding of the
situation which is being talked about
Examples:
The night was black as ever, but bright stars lit up the sky in
beautiful and varied constellations which were sprinkled across the
astronomical landscape.

Note: The highlighted words are examples of adjectives.