Ballad - Explanation
Introduction:
The simple definition of Ballad is,
“It is a song
transmitted orally which tells a story”
The original version was composed by words of mouth. It is an art to
produce songs and stories orally. Popular ballads exist with various forms.
Typically the popular ballad is dramatic and personal; the narrator
begins with a dramatic episode to tell the story. The narrator tells the story
briefly by means of action and dialogues and tells it without expressing his
personal attitude.
- Origin and meaning:
Ballad is a narrative
set with music. Ballads derived from the medieval French chanson ballade,
which were originally "danced songs''. The shorter oxford dictionary
explains the meaning of the ballad as,
“A simple spirited poem in
short stanzas, narrative some popular poetry.”
Ballads are quite old. Most of them
have been composed at time between 1350 and 1550. Ballad influenced the whole
English poetry and English literature in general. They were widely used across
Europe, and later in the America, Australia and North Africa. Ballads are often
13 lines with an ABABBCBC form, consisting of couplets (two lines) of rhymed
verse, each of 14 syllables. Another common form is ABAB or ABCB repeated, in
alternating 8 and 6 syllable lines.
Ballad was often used by poets and
composers from the 18th century onwards to produce lyrical ballads. In the
later 19th century, the term took the meaning of a slow form of popular love
song and is now often used for any love song, particularly the sentimental
ballad of pop or rock.
- Subjects of Ballad:
1. Sex and violence:
Ballad is a narrative poetry. It tells us the story. There are some
subjects, which time and again come in the form of ballad and the most popular
among them is sex and violence. ‘Children are thrown from castle wall on to
sharp spears of surround by soldiers, guilty lovers found in their beds and
bloodily murdered, Woman who poison their husbands and sell their children, men
butchered in family quarrels and left on the road to be eaten by dogs and crows
and girls seeded and cruelly murdered.
2. Supernatural elements:
In those old days, people lived in the fear of war and violence. They
also were feared from unseen supernatural dangers. That is the reason we find
ghost, magic, witchcrafts and superstition in ballad.
“Lenore” is a poem by Burger, a German romantic poet. The subject of
this poem is that the dead lover returns to take his bride with him.
3. Robin Hood Ballad:
Robin Hood is one of the great English folk-heroes. He was probably a
real historical character who lived in the English north middle part in the 12th
century. He was an outlaw and had his group. They were against the authority
and they called themselves defender of ‘true’ justice. They helped the poor and
the weak. Robin is a typical hero. These types of ballads are less tragic and
more humorous. They are graceful. It is the quality that young readers favour
them.
Three types of Ballad:
There are
three main types of ballads – the traditional ballads, the broadside
ballad and the literary ballad. 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; the broadside ballad was
printed on a sheet of paper known as a broadside, and 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.
1. Traditional Ballad:
‘A
short narrative song preserved and transmitted orally among illiterate or
semi-literate people’.
In the
British Isles the folk ballad is medieval in origin; and it flourished into the
16th and 17th centuries. The most famous group of ballads
in the British Isles is known as the Border Ballads, because they
originated around the English-Scottish border. 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.
2. Broadside Ballads:
A broadside is a large
sheet of paper printed on one side only. The broadside ballad refers to ballads
which were sold on the streets and at country fairs in Britain from 16-20th
centuries. They were sung to well-known tunes and often dealt with current
events, issues or scandals, equal of contemporary scandalous papers, Entertainment
for urban rather than rural population.
3. Literary Ballads:
Whereas
the popular ballad is a piece of folk art, orally transmitted and of unknown
authorship, literary ballads are written by educated poets in imitation of
the form and style of the traditional ballad. From the time of Wordsworth,
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.
Examples:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
(sometimes 6 lines, sometimes with internal rhymes) and John Keats's “La
Belle Dame Sans Merci”.
Characteristics of Ballad:
Ballads
begin just before the catastrophe or change which concludes the story, the time
period is short. Ballads have been compared to the last act of a play. Ballads
engage your attention at once. They begin in medias res (in the middle
of things). Usually, the action is presented in a sequence of little dramatic
scene, or in a question and answer format.
1. 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. Mostly ballad contains third person narration, if the
narrator is not speaking as the character in the story.
2. 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.
3. Stories:
Ballads
tend to be narrative poems, poems that tell stories, as
opposed to lyric poems, which emphasize the emotions of the
speaker.
4. Ballad stanzas:
The traditional ballad stanza consists
of four lines, rhymed ABCB (or sometimes ABAB) The first and
third lines have four stresses, while the second and fourth have three.
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’s knee.
5. Repetition:
This is an
important feature of ballad. 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 is common in many ballads, when a person – often a
dying person - is asked how he or she is
going to organize his/her belongings, and he or she answers in a striking and
often ironic fashion, usually ending with a curse on the victim.
6. Content
In the ballads we find the same thematic mixture, we
would find in modern bestsellers: Love and sexuality in various forms:
Tragic love, Betrayal, murder and revenge, Magic and the supernatural, Stories
of heroism, battle, adventure.
- Sophistication of the Ballad:
Old ballads are not sophisticated poetry as of T. S. Eliot, Wordsworth
but these poems were the most popular in those days. It is unfair to compare
the poetry with sophisticated poetry. It has strange poetic qualities of its
own.
- Renewal of Ballad (contemporary Ballad):
In the middle half of the
present century, Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) wrote the tragic and splendid
“Ballad of reading God”, Rudyard Kipling used the old forms and styles in
“Barrack Room Ballad” and W. H. Auden has written in the tradition of the
ballad in “Victor” and “Miss Gee”.
Many modern writers have continued
writing in the ballad form; poets use it to create certain effects and
songwriters (especially folk singer/songwriters) have continued the tradition
of the oral ballad.
The young groups of modern
age sing Ballads with guitar at public house and coffee bars.
Reference - Wikipedia
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