Introduction to narrative poetry and the ballad. Border, broadside and literary ballad.

1. Poetic Forms & Genres Narrative Poetry: The Ballad Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

3. Nowadays the novel is the dominant literary form, so it’s easy to forget that telling stories in prose was preceded by narrative poetry

4. 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. Both the ballad and the epic had these oral origins.Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

5. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres Both the ballad and the epic have long histories as spoken communal forms, (‘orature’), before they were finally written down. The ballads only began to be collected in the 18th and 19th centuries. One sign of the fact that ballads were orally transmitted for a long time is that many ballads exist in multiple forms. Oral poetry contains elements of improvisation

8. E.g. The phrase ‘Once upon a time’ is a stock phraseSarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

9. Example stock phrases from Beowulf swefanaeftersymble(asleep after banquet) grim and graedig(fierce and ravenous) reoc and rede(savage and reckless) formulaic features are found in all oral poetry, including the ballad Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

11. 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;

12. the broadside ballad was printed on a sheet of paper known as a broadside, and

13. the literary ballad, the most recent of the three, is written by educated poets in imitation of the form and style of the popular ballad.Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

15. In the British Isles the folk ballad is medieval in origin; and it flourished into the 16th and 17th centuries .

16. The most famous group of ballads in the British isles is known as the Border Ballads, because they originated around the English-Scottish border.

17. Narrative songs of this kind are found in all European countries, and in other places such as the American West in the 19C or the Australian outback. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

18. Border Ballads They onlystarted to be systematically collected and published in book form during the 18th and 19th centuries. Famous compilations: 1765 Percy’s Reliques 19thC. Child’s Ballads (compiled by an American Scholar) Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

20. Ballads engage your attention at once. They begin in medias res (in the middle of things).

21. Usually, the action is presented by means of a sequence of little dramatic scenes, or in a question and answer format. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

22. The Narrator The narration of ballads is impersonal - we don’t get any clue as to the personality and nature of the narrator There may be an ‘I’ in a ballad, but the singer tends to be a representative of some larger social structure – a community or nation. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

24. Because of the intense focus, there’s no time for an account of the people’s characters or for explorations of motives.

25. Often we don’t even get the physical appearance of characters Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

26. Literary/ Linguistic Devices Many of the literary and linguistic devices we find in ballads are there to help the memory of the performer. Rhyme – simple and predictable, usually monosyllabic rhyme. Formulae: ‘magic numbers’ 7 or 3; stock phrases such as ‘milk-white steed’, ‘blood-red wine’ Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

27. Repetition An important feature of ballads Refrain – repeated lines or phrases. A particular version of this is called incremental repetition – a line or stanza is repeated but with additions that take the story forward by introducing new details The question and answer format common in many ballads is another form of parallelism, especially... Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

28. Repetition ... One common form of repetition is the use of the oral testament, when a person – often a dying person - is asked how he or she is going to dispose of his possessions, and he or she answers in a striking and often ironic fashion, usually ending with a curse on the victim Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

30. E.g. (‘Lord Thomas and Fair Annet’) He had a rose into his hand He gave it kisses three, And reaching by the nut-brown bride, Laid it on fair Annet’sknee. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

31. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres Another common form is a quatrain with 4 stress lines rhyming abcb, or lines rhyming abab, or 4 stress aabb quatrain. The ballad can take many different stanza forms (sometimes not in quatrains) but the ballad stanzais an important one.

32. Ballad content In the ballads we find the same thematic mix we would find in modern bestsellers: Love and sexuality in various forms: requited and unrequited, Tragic love, Betrayal, murder and revenge. Magic and the supernatural. Stories of heroism, battle, adventure. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

34. The equivalent of contemporary tabloid papers.

35. Entertainment for urban rather than rural populationSarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

36. Francis Child (19thC compiler): Approved of and compiled folk ballads. Disapproved of broadside ballads: ‘The vulgar ballads of our day, the ‘broadsides’ which were printed in such large numbers in England and elsewhere in the 16th century or later . . . are products of a low kind of art, and most of them are, from a literary point of view, thoroughly despicable and worthless.’ Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

38. from the time of Wordsworth on, the ballad became an accepted and reputable part of the genre system of English poetry. In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge published a collaborative volume called Lyrical Ballads.Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

40. Many people, particularly those who started out in the folk music movement in the 1960s have either sung old ballads, or written new ballads drawing on the devices of the traditional ballad. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

42. E.g. Dudley Randall, ‘Ballad of Birmingham’ based on a historical event - the bombing in 1963 of Martin Luther King's church in Birmingham, Alabama by white terrorists. The poem portrays one girl's life and death. (Four girls actually died in the real bombing.) Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

43. "Mother dear, may I go downtown Instead of out to play, And march the streets of Birmingham In a Freedom March today?" "No, baby, no, you may not go, For the dogs are fierce and wild, And clubs and hoses, guns and jails Aren't good for a little child." … Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres