Page 10 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 1: Major Literary Terms–I

J. R. R. Tolkien’s Errantry is a poem whose meter contains three sets of trisyllabic assonances in Notes
every set of four lines. Assonance can also be used in forming proverbs, often a form of short poetry.
In the Oromo language of Ethiopia, note the use of a single vowel throughout the following proverb,
an extreme form of assonance:
• kan mana baala, alaa gaala (“A leaf at home, but a camel elsewhere”; somebody who has a big
reputation among those who do not know him well.)
In more modern verse, stressed assonance is frequently used as a rhythmic device in modern rap.
An example is Public Enemy’s ‘Don’t Believe The Hype’: “Their pens and pads I snatch ‘cause I’ve
had it/I’m not an addict, fiending for static/I see their tape recorder and I grab it/No, you can’t
have it back, silly rabbit”.
Assonance differs from RHYME in that RHYME is a similarity of vowel and consonant. “Lake” and
“fake” demonstrate RHYME; “lake” and “fate” assonance. Assonance is a common substitution for
END-RHYME in the popular ballad, as in these lines from “The Twa Corbies”:

In behint yon auld fail dyke,
I wot there lies a new-slain Knight.
Such substitution of assonance for END-RHYME is also characteristic of Emily Dickinson’s verse,
and is used extensively by many contemporary poets.

1.2 Introduction to Ballad

Ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of
British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and
used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many ballads
were written and sold as single sheet broadsides. The form was often used by poets and composers
from the 18th century onwards to produce lyrical ballads. In the later 19th century it took on the
meaning of a slow form of popular love song and the term is now often used as synonymous with
any love song, particularly the pop or rock power ballad.

1.2.1 Origins of Ballad

The ballad probably derives its name from medieval French dance songs or “ballares” (from which
we also get ballet), as did the alternative rival form that became the French Ballade. In theme and
function they may originate from Scandinavian and Germanic traditions of storytelling that can be
seen in poems such as Beowulf.

The earliest example we have of a recognisable ballad in form in England is ‘Judas’ in
a 13th-century manuscript.

1.2.2 Ballad Form

Most, but not all, northern and west European ballads are written in ballad stanzas or quatrains
(four-line stanzas) of alternating lines of iambic (an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable)
tetrameter (eight syllables) and iambic trimeter (six syllables), known as ballad meter. Usually, only
the second and fourth line of a quatrain are rhymed (in the scheme a, b, c, b), which has been taken to
suggest that, originally, ballads consisted of couplets (two lines) of rhymed verse, each of 14 syllables.
As can be seen in this stanza from ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Annet’:

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