| November 19 Workshop Information Moderator: Cheryl Wilkie |
Poetic Forms: Ballads Versus Unstructured Narratives | List of all workshops |
The workshop was about the differences between traditional English ballads and types and styles of modern narrative ballads.
The general rules for old English ballads include the following: They are written in quatrains with alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, only the second and fourth lines are rhymed, and the story stays on track from beginning to ending.
Following is an example excerpted from a ballad by Oscar Wilde.
I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.
The modern variations of narratives can be any poetry form that has a story. I chose to focus on free verse narratives, although I presented one narrative that contained rhymed couplets throughout. I presented two quatrains of every other line rhyming and then asked the members to continue this rather eerie beginning to a ballad.