Ballad Flashcards
It is a ? Which is usually but not always arranged in? With a ?
Short narrative
Four line stanzas
Distinctive and memorable meter
The usual ballad meter is a ? And then a ?
First and third line with four stresses (iambic tetrameter)
Second and fourth with three stresses (iambic trimeter)
The rhyme scheme is
Abab
Or
Abcb
The subject matter is ?
Distinctive
Almost always communal stories of lost love supernatural happenings or recent events
The ballad maker used ? This is especially a feature of
Popular and local speech and dialogue often vividly to convey the story
Early ballads
In Ireland often
In England he
In America
Village citizen/ bystander at political events and natural disasters
Stood outside the court outside history reminding populace of passage through imperial history and their exclusion from it
Poetry developed at the same time as literacy and less need for a division between the oral and written the ballad became part of the vocabulary of ordinary accomplishments of the American poet
Came to poetry from
It is a form found in its shape structure and rhetoric are all defined by
Song
Every language country and culture
Roots in the oral tradition
As a form it is ? Almost always a
And subtly ?
The ballad keeps the audience
It’s subject matter is
Simple direct / short narrative/ left open for the next user so that details names and events can be added on if necessary
Audience awake
Tabloid
It is ?
It leaps from
Signature Traits
Lurid musical communal
Event to event
The way that vernacular dialogue breaks into the narrative turning it into a living vivid theatre of the speech of its particular moment
In the anonymous fifteenth century ballad sir Patrick spens
A Knight has been
He ? Before the ballad is finished
It is
Sent by the Scottish king to sail out on dangerous sea
Drowns
Beautiful and economical
Earliest ballad in manuscript form called is in collection at
Probably dates from the ? But maybe
The majority of ballads were not teanscribed until ? So?
Judas
Cambridge library
14 and 15th century / earlier
18th century / great deal of info about them has been lost
Not until the end of the 19th century did an ?
English scholar FJ child produce a 5 volume archive of ballad versions and alternatives called the English and Scottish ballads
Nevertheless there have been intense disagreements about ?
There was a ?
What was it about
Disagreements about their origins
Ballad war
One set said they were communal and grew out of dances and rituals
Individual made by one balladeer informed by communal concerns
No one can agree also on ? All varieties are based on Some have said meter is Some say it is And others say
Meter Four lines Accentual Accentual syllabic Foot verse with metrical pauses but not confined by them
Early ballad meter is
Each line has ?
The music builds from ? Often making a
A series of small intense sound snapshots
Four stresses or four and three
Verde to Verde/ hypnotic narrative
