0
0
Poetry can be divided into three forms: narrative, dramatic, and lyrical. Within narrative poetry, there are other sub-genres of poetry. One of these happen to be known as the ballad.
A ballad is a form of verse and often set to poetry. Like all narrative poems, a ballad contains a plot. Before the 19th century, ballads were mainly only written and performed in Great Britain since the later medieval period. During the 19th century, the poetic form spread across Europe and eventually made its way to North America, Australia, and North Africa. During the later parts of the 19th century, the form took upon a new meaning as a slow love song and eventually made its way to mean any long song, especially rock or pop.
The earliest ballad can be found in the thirteenth-century manuscript titled “Judas.” However, the theme may actually originate in Scandinavian and Germanic storytelling.
Many of the northern and western European ballads were written in quatrains (four-line stanzas) with alternating lines of iambic (an unstressed then stressed syllable) tetrameter (eight syllables) and iambic trimeter (six syllables), known as ballad meter. Generally, only the second and fourth line of each quatrain are rhymed which might suggest that originally ballads were written in couplets with the endings rhymed. The ballad’s first use is said to be by bards or wandering minstrels throughout late medieval Europe.
Nonetheless, Spanish ballads differ greatly in structure from the European ballad. The Spanish ballads, also known as romanceros, are octosyllabic and use consonance instead of rhyme. Other languages and countries versions may also differ greatly from the western European form of ballad.
Today, the definition of ballad is largely up to discussion. The form of poetry is continually expanding and now consists of tens or even hundreds of internal forms.
