The poem is very strictly structured in terms of meter and rhyme, and tells a story of an old sailor who stops people on their way into a party. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one of the best examples of a ballad. Examples of Ballads in Literature Example 1 This combination of art forms lends ample opportunity for creativity and individual expression. Today, a ballad is still a great way to combine two separate forms of literature – like a novel or play, the ballad tells a story with characters and a plot line but at the same time, it has the meter and rhyme of a poem. Moore’s poem is easy to remember because it has a simple rhyme scheme and a very predictable rhythm (meter), and because the story it tells is a charming Christmas narrative that parents love to tell to their kids.īallads are perhaps the most ancient of all literary forms – the earliest works of literature that we know of are all mythological epic poems that tell the stories of the culture that produced them. One of the most popular ballads is The Night Before Christmas by Clement Clarke Moore. John challenges the machine to a drilling race, and wins through his immense strength and stamina – but in the end the effort kills him. For example, the “Ballad of John Henry,” also known as “The Steel-Driving Man.” There are countless versions of the song, ranging across blues, folk music, and bluegrass, but the basic story is always the same: John Henry’s job on the railroad is threatened by the industrial power of a steam drill. However, this has no significant relationship to the literary definition. In popular music, the word ballad can also refer to a slow, romantic, or sentimental song. However, the word “ballad” typically refers to the relatively short lyrical poems produced by European poets starting around the 13 th century. Nearly every culture on earth produces ballads, often in the form of epic poems relating to the culture’s mythology. The ballad form is enormously diverse, and poems in this form may have any one of hundreds of different rhyme schemes and meters. A ballad is a poem that tells a story, usually (but not always) in four-line stanzas called quatrains.
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