illustrated profiles of a man and a woman set against the backdrop of a red rose

A Red, Red Rose

by Robert Burns

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Student Question

What is the form of "A Red, Red Rose"?

Quick answer:

“A Red, Red Rose” is in the ballad form, with a few variations. It contains four stanzas of four lines each, with alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter.

Expert Answers

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Robert Burns's “A Red, Red Rose” has the form of a ballad, a simple narrative song, but with a few twists that the poet throws in for variation in the last two stanzas. Let's look at the details of the poem's form.

Ballads have four-line stanzas (quatrains) with lines that alternate between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. In other words, the first and third lines of each stanza have four stressed beats that alternate with unstressed beats in an unstressed-stressed pattern. The second and fourth lines of each stanza have three stressed beats that follow the same unstressed-stressed pattern. In a ballad, the second and fourth lines of each stanza must rhyme. The first and third lines can as well, but they don't have to.

Looking at “A Red, Red Rose,” then, we see this ballad form clearly in the first two stanzas. Burns sets his meter and his rhyme regularly. We can see a fine example of iambic tetrameter and trimeter in lines 5 and 6, for instance, which scans as follows (with the stressed syllables in bold):

So fair art thou, my bonnie lass.
So deep in luve am I.

Burns still follows the ballad form in other stanzas, but he varies it just a little, throwing in some extra syllables that can actually glide together with neighboring syllables to retain the basic meter. In line 10, for instance, if we count “And” and “the” as a single unstressed syllable, the iambic trimeter still works. Burns also uses repetition rather than rhyme at the end of the first and third lines in the last two stanzas. This, too, is a minor variation from the ballad.

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