Page 11 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes The horse| fair Ann|et rode| upon|

He amb|led like| the wind|,
With sil|ver he| was shod| before,
With burn|ing gold| behind|.

However, there is considerable variation on this pattern in almost every respect, including length,
number of lines and rhyming scheme, making the strict definition of a ballad extremely difficult. In
southern and Eastern Europe, and in countries that derive their tradition from them, ballad structure
differs significantly, like Spanish romanceros, which are octosyllabic and use consonance rather
than rhyme.

Explain ballad form and traditional ballads.
In all traditions most ballads are narrative in nature, with a self-contained story, often concise and
relying on imagery, rather than description, which can be tragic, historical, romantic or comic.
Another common feature of ballads is repetition, sometimes of fourth lines in succeeding stanzas,
as a refrain, sometimes of third and fourth lines of a stanza and sometimes of entire stanzas.

1.2.3 Classification of Ballads
European Ballads have been generally classified into three major groups: traditional, broadside and
literary. In America a distinction is drawn between ballads that are versions of European, particularly
British and Irish songs, and ‘native American ballads’, developed without reference to earlier songs.
A further development was the evolution of the blues ballad, which mixed the genre with Afro-
American music. For the late 19th century the music publishing industry found a market for what are
often termed sentimental ballads, and these are the origin of the modern use of the term ballad to
mean a slow love song.

1.2.4 Traditional Ballads

The traditional, classical or popular (meaning of the people) ballad has been seen as originating
with the wandering minstrels of late medieval Europe. From the end of the 15th century we have
printed ballads that suggest a rich tradition of popular music. We know from a reference in William
Langland’s Piers Plowman, that ballads about Robin Hood were being sung from at least the late
14th century and the oldest detailed material we have is Wynkyn de Worde’s collection of Robin
Hood ballads printed about 1495.
Early collections of ballads were made by Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) and in the Roxburghe Ballads
collected by Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer (1661–1724). In the 18th century there
were increasing numbers of such collections, including Thomas D’Urfey’s Wit and Mirth: or, Pills
to Purge Melancholy (1719–20) and Bishop Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
(1765). The last of these also contained some oral material and by the end of the 18th century this
was becoming increasingly common, with collections including John Ritson’s, The Bishopric Garland
(1784), which paralleled the work of figures like Robert Burns and Walter Scott in Scotland.
Key work on the traditional ballad was undertaken in the late 19th century in Denmark by Svend
Grundtvig and for England and Scotland by the Harvard professor Francis James Child. They
attempted to record and classify all the known ballads and variants in their chosen regions. Since

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