Poetry Exercise 11
As you can see I have headed each section above with my own attempts to describe each stanza form under discussion in its own dress. Your exercise is to do the same but better. I look forward to bumping into you one day in the street or on a train and hearing you recite to me in triumphal tones your self- referential rhymes royal and auto-descriptive Ruba’iyat.
III
The Ballad
In fours and threes and threes and fours
The BALLAD beats its drum:
‘The Ancient Mariner’ of course
Remains the exemplum.
With manly eights (or female nines)
You are allowed if ’tis your pleasure,
To stretch the length to equal lines
And make a ballad of LONG MEASURE.
Well, what more need a poet know?
In technical prosodic parlance we could say that most ballads present in quatrains of alternate cross-rhymed iambic tetrameter and trimeter. However, since the ballad is a swinging, popular form derived from song and folk traditions it is much better described as a form that comes in four-line verses, usually alternating between four and three beats to line. The word comes from ballare, the Italian for ‘to dance’ (same root as ballet, ballerina and ball).
The ballad’s irresistible lilt is familiar to us in everything from nursery rhymes to rugby songs. We know it as soon as we hear it, the shape and the rhythm seem inborn:There’s nothing like a ballad songFor lightening the load–I’ll chant the buggers all day longUntil my tits explode.A sweetly warbled ballad verseWill never flag or tireI sing ’em loud for best or worseThough both my balls catch fire.I’ll roar my ballads loud and gruff,Like a lion in the zooAnd if I sing ’em loud enough’Twill tear my arse in two.
Or whatever. Old-fashioned inversions, expletives (both the rude kind and the kind that fill out the metre) and other such archaic tricks considered inadmissible or old-fashioned in serious poetry suit the folksy nature of ballad. The ballad is pub poetry, it is naughty and nautical, crude and carefree. Its elbows are always on the table, it never lowers the seat for ladies after it’s been or covers its mouth when it burps. It can be macabre, brutal, sinister, preachy, ghostly, doom-laden, lurid, erotic, mock-solemn, facetious, pious or obscene– sometimes it exhibits all of those qualities at once. Its voice is often that of the club bore, the drunken rogue, the music hall entertainer or the campfire strummer. It has little interest in descriptions of landscape or the psychology of the individual. Chief among its virtues is a keen passion to tell you a story: it will grab you by the lapels, stare you in the eyes and plunge right in:Now gather round and let me tellThe tale of Danny Wise:And how his sweet wife AnnabelleDid suck out both his eyes.And if I tell the story trueAnd if I tell it clear,There’s not a mortal one of youWon’t shriek in mortal fear.
How could we not want to know more? Did she really suck them out? Was Danny Wise asleep? Was Annabelle a witch? How did it all turn out? Did he get his revenge? Is the teller of the tale poor Danny himself? Sadly, I have no idea because the rest of it hasn’t come to me yet.
While the second and fourth lines should rhyme, the first and third do not need to, it is up to the balladeer to choose, abab or abcb: nor is any regularity or consistency in your rhyme-scheme required throughout, as this popular old ballad demonstrates:In Scarlet Town, where I was born,There was a fair maid dwellin’Made every lad cry wellaway,And her name was Barbara Allen.All in the merry month of May,When green buds they were swellin’,Young Jemmy Grove on his deathbed lay,For love of Barbara Allen.
A quatrain is by no means compulsory, a six-line stanza is commonly found, rhyming xbxbxb, as in Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ and Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol.The Walrus and the CarpenterWere walking close at hand:They wept like anything to seeSuch quantities of sand:‘If this were only cleared away,’They said, ‘it would be grand.’And all men kill the thing they love,By all let this be heard,Some do it with a bitter look,Some with a flattering word,The coward does it with a kiss,The brave man with a sword!
Although more ‘literary’ examples may favour a regular accentual-syllabic measure, ballads are perfect examples of accentual verse: it doesn’t matter how many syllables there are, it is the beats that matter. Here is Marriot Edgar’s ‘Albert and the Lion’, which was written as a comic monologue to be recited to a background piano that plunks down its chords on the beats of each four-or three- stress line. Part of the pleasure of this style of ballad is the mad scudding rush of unaccented syllables, the pausing, the accelerations and decelerations: when Stanley Holloway performed this piece, the audience started to laugh simply at his timing of the rhythm. I have marked with underlines the syllables that might receive a little extra push if required: it is usually up to the performer. Recite it as you read.There’s a famous seaside place called Blackpool,That’s noted for fresh-air and fun,And Mr and Mrs RamsbottomWent there with young Albert, their son.A grand little lad was their AlbertAll dressed in his best; quite a swell’E’d a stick with an ’orse’s ’ead ’andleThe finest that Woolworths could sell.
Or there’s Wallace Casalingua’s ‘The Day My Trousers Fell’, which has even more syllables to contend with:Now I trust that your ears you’ll be lending,To this tale of our decadent times;There’s a be ginning, a middle and an endingAnd for the most part there’s rhythms and verses and
rhymes.My name, you must know, is John Weston,Though to my friends I’m Jackie or Jack;I’ve a place on the outskirts of Preston,The tiniest scrap of a garden with a shed and a hammock
round’t
