Guide to Literary Terms

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Guide to Literary Terms | Ballad

Ballad - a short, narrative folk song that fixes on the most dramatic part of a story, moving to its conclusion by the means of dialogue and a series of incidences. It represents a type of literary and musical development across Europe in the late Middle Ages and tends to have a tight dramatic structure that sometimes omits all preliminary material, all exposition and description, even all motivation, to focus on the climactic scene. The narrator is impersonal and the listener or reader is left to supply the antecedent material. Folk ballads are transmitted orally, and therefore, subject to continual change, although most seem to be domestic, simple, stanzad, rhymed, and use language and action which are stylized. Clichés and conventionalized conduct are typical in ballads which are still common in northern Greece, parts of the central Balkans, and Sicily. Originally, the term signified a song accompanied by a dance. Later, it came to mean a narrative poem with short stanzas designed for singing or oral recitation. There are four types of ballads:

1. folk ballad which is derived from the medieval oral traditions

2. literary ballad which is a deliberate attempt by its author to capture the charm of the folk ballad

3. broadside ballad which proliferated in the Eighteenth Century, sold for a penny: printed on sheets of paper called “broadside,” they included suggestions for the tune to which they should be sung

4. a sentimental tune with melodramatic lyrics, popular in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

The word comes from the Old French ballade, which derived from the Provençal ballada. This originated from the Low Latin ballare, which means “to dance.”

An example of a ballad is “Bill,” which has been sung by sailors for decades:

He lay dead on the cluttered deck and stared at the cold skies,
With never a friend to mourn for him nor a hand to close his eyes:
“Bill, he’s dead,” was all they said; “he’s dead, ’n’ there he lies.”
The mate came forward at seven bells and spat across the rail:
“Just lash him up wi’ some holystone in a clout o’ rotten sail,
“’N’, rot ye, get a gait on ye, ye’re slower’n a bloody snail!”
When the rising moon was a copper disc and the sea was a strip of steel,
We dumped him down to the swaying weeds ten fathom beneath the keel.
“It’s rough about Bill,” the fo’c’s’le said, “we’ll have to stand his wheel.”

see: folklore

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