Ballad

A narrative poem traditionally associated with song, often using short stanzas, regular rhythm and rhyme.

A storytelling poem traditionally associated with song, rhythm and repetition. Tennyson’s poem has ballad-like qualities without following a standard ballad stanza throughout.

The poem is a narrative in six unequal stanzas, with ballad-like rhythm and repetition suited to telling and remembering a public story. The first three stanzas take the brigade towards the guns; the fourth describes close combat; the fifth follows the survivors back; the sixth turns to commemoration.

Connect context to a particular interpretation. Keats’s experience of tuberculosis can illuminate the illness imagery; Romantic interest in older storytelling traditions helps explain his ballad form.

Describe the rhythm as ballad-like, supporting this with the quatrains, alternating rhyme and recurring beat rather than assuming all ballads have identical metre.

A narrative poem associated with storytelling and song, often using four-line stanzas, repetition and a regular rhyme pattern.

Keats’s ballad offers another kind of loss: an intensely desired encounter gives way to isolation.

A narrative poem associated with storytelling and song. A literary ballad is deliberately written by a poet using features of that tradition, such as repetition, dialogue and regular stanzas.

A narrative poem traditionally associated with oral storytelling, often using regular rhythm, rhyme and repetition.

A poem that tells a story, traditionally associated with song and often using regular rhyme, rhythm and repetition.

A traditional narrative poem or song, often using regular stanzas, alternating longer and shorter lines, repetition and rhyme.

Its ballad-like movement comes from alternating longer and shorter lines, generally carrying four and three main stresses. The rhythm is predominantly iambic, moving from an unstressed syllable towards a stressed one. The even-numbered lines rhyme throughout each stanza, producing a recurring, song-like sound.

A narrative poem traditionally associated with song, often using regular rhyme and alternating four-beat and three-beat lines.

Definition

How each exam board covers it

AQA GCSE English Literature · 8702

Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0

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Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720