A ballad is a poem that tells a story in short stanzas, traditionally quatrains in ballad meter: lines of four beats and three beats in turn, rhymed ABCB, made to be sung. Folk ballads such as “Sir Patrick Spens” and “Lord Randal” are anonymous and survive in many versions. Literary ballads, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), John Keats's “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and Oscar Wilde's “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898), are written by known poets in the folk manner.
The 12 ballad poem examples below are ten classics, from the old Scottish ballads to Edna St. Vincent Millay in 1922, and two new ballads written for this page. The three folk ballads, Keats's “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and the two new ballads are complete; the other six are excerpts from longer poems, and each label says which part. The modern ballads near the end are reading suggestions, not part of the twelve. Each example comes with a note on the technique worth borrowing, and the Scots words get short glosses.
| Section | What you'll find | Ballads |
|---|---|---|
| SectionBallad meter | What you'll findThe four-and-three stanza and the habits of the old ballads | Ballads– |
| SectionTraditional ballads | What you'll findSir Patrick Spens, Lord Randal, The Twa Corbies | Ballads1–3 |
| SectionLiterary ballads | What you'll findColeridge, Keats, Kipling, Wilde, Noyes, Service, Millay | Ballads4–10 |
| SectionModern ballads | What you'll findRandall, Brooks, Auden, Bishop, described but not quoted | Ballads– |
| SectionNew ballads | What you'll findA ghost on a county road, a fight about the garbage | Ballads11–12 |
Ballad meter and the ballad stanza
The standard ballad stanza is four lines: the first and third have four beats, the second and fourth have three, and only the second and fourth rhyme. Hymn writers call the same pattern common meter, and the guide to meter in poetry scans it in Emily Dickinson. Read the first stanza of “Sir Patrick Spens” aloud with the beats stressed:
The king sits in Dumferling toune,
Drinking the blude-reid wine:
‘O whar will I get guid sailor,
To sail this schip of mine?’
The beat matters more than the syllable count, and it can land on a word speech would barely stress: some readers put the second beat of line 1 on “sits” rather than “in,” and either way the line has four. Singers squeeze extra light syllables in wherever the tune allows, which is why folk ballads sound loose and literary ballads, written to be read, usually sound tighter. Versions also differ in more than syllables. Child collected some eighteen versions of “Sir Patrick Spens”: in some the ship goes down on the outward voyage, while many others take it to Norway first. Beyond the meter, the old ballads share a set of habits:
| Habit | What it does | Where to see it |
|---|---|---|
| HabitStarting in medias res | What it doesNo introductions; the story is already under way | Where to see it“Sir Patrick Spens” opens on the king at his wine |
| HabitDialogue without tags | What it doesSpeakers change with no “he said” | Where to see it“Lord Randal,” “The Twa Corbies” |
| HabitIncremental repetition | What it doesEach stanza repeats the last with one thing changed | Where to see it“Lord Randal” |
| HabitRefrain | What it doesA repeated line or chorus that gathers weight | Where to see it“Danny Deever” |
| HabitStock phrases | What it doesReady-made phrases a singer can remember | Where to see it“blude-reid wine,” “bonny blue een” |
| HabitLeaps and gaps | What it doesThe big event happens offstage | Where to see itThe storm in “Sir Patrick Spens” |
| HabitDark subjects | What it doesMurder, shipwreck, ghosts, faery lovers, executions | Where to see itAlmost every ballad on this page |
Traditional ballad examples
These ballads were sung for generations before anyone wrote them down. Bishop Thomas Percy printed many in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), Walter Scott collected more in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and the scholar Francis James Child gathered 305 of them, with all their variants, in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–1898). The number after each title below is Child's.
The king sits in Dumferling toune,
Drinking the blude-reid wine:
‘O whar will I get guid sailor,
To sail this schip of mine?’
Up and spak an eldern knicht,
Sat at the kings richt kne:
‘Sir Patrick Spence is the best sailor
That sails upon the se.’
The king has written a braid letter,
And signd it wi his hand,
And sent it to Sir Patrick Spence,
Was walking on the sand.
The first line that Sir Patrick red,
A loud lauch lauched he;
The next line that Sir Patrick red,
The teir blinded his ee.
‘O wha is this has don this deid,
This ill deid don to me,
To send me out this time o’ the yeir,
To sail upon the se!
‘Mak hast, mak haste, my mirry men all,
Our guid schip sails the morne:’
‘O say na sae, my master deir,
For I feir a deadlie storme.
‘Late late yestreen I saw the new moone,
Wi the auld moone in hir arme,
And I feir, I feir, my deir master,
That we will cum to harme.’
O our Scots nobles wer richt laith
To weet their cork-heild schoone;
Bot lang owre a’ the play wer playd,
Thair hats they swam aboone.
O lang, lang may their ladies sit,
Wi thair fans into their hand,
Or eir they se Sir Patrick Spence
Cum sailing to the land.
O lang, lang may the ladies stand,
Wi thair gold kems in their hair,
Waiting for thair ain deir lords,
For they’ll se thame na mair.
Haf owre, haf owre to Aberdour,
It’s fiftie fadom deip,
And thair lies guid Sir Patrick Spence,
Wi the Scots lords at his feit.
Glosses: braid, broad (an open letter); lauch, laugh; yestreen, yesterday evening; laith, loath; cork-heild schoone, cork-heeled shoes; aboone, above; kems, combs; haf owre, halfway over.
The ballad never shows the shipwreck. It goes from the sailor's warning straight to the nobles' hats floating on the water, then to the women waiting on shore and the bodies fifty fathoms down. That gap is the most powerful thing in the poem. Coleridge took the stanza about the new moon as the epigraph for “Dejection: An Ode,” a sign of how much the Romantic poets learned from ballads like this; the ode examples show where that learning went.
‘O where hae ye been, Lord Randal, my son?
O where hae ye been, my handsome young man?’
‘I hae been to the wild wood; mother, make my bed soon,
For I’m weary wi hunting, and fain wald lie down.’
‘Where gat ye your dinner, Lord Randal, my son?
Where gat ye your dinner, my handsome young man?’
‘I dined wi my true-love; mother, make my bed soon,
For I’m weary wi hunting, and fain wald lie down.’
‘What gat ye to your dinner, Lord Randal, my son?
What gat ye to your dinner, my handsome young man?’
‘I gat eels boiled in broo; mother, make my bed soon,
For I’m weary wi hunting, and fain wald lie down.’
‘What became of your bloodhounds, Lord Randal, my son?
What became of your bloodhounds, my handsome young man?’
‘O they swelld and they died; mother, make my bed soon,
For I’m weary wi hunting, and fain wald lie down.’
‘O I fear ye are poisond, Lord Randal, my son!
O I fear ye are poisond, my handsome young man!’
‘O yes! I am poisond; mother, make my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wald lie down.’
Glosses: gat, got; broo, broth; fain wald, would gladly.
The whole story is told in questions and answers between a mother and her son, with no narrator at all. Each stanza repeats the last and changes one detail, an effect called incremental repetition, until the truth is out: his true-love has poisoned him. The refrain changes only once, in the last line, from “weary wi hunting” to “sick at the heart.” Child printed more than a dozen versions of this ballad, which shows how widely it traveled.
As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a mane;
The tane unto the t’other say,
‘Where sall we gang and dine to-day?’
‘In behint yon auld fail dyke,
I wot there lies a new slain knight;
And naebody kens that he lies there,
But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair.
‘His hound is to the hunting gane,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady’s ta’en another mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet.
‘Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I’ll pike out his bonny blue een;
Wi ae lock o his gowden hair
We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare.
‘Mony a one for him makes mane,
But nane sall ken where he is gane;
O’er his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair.’
Glosses: corbies, crows; mane, moan; the tane, the one; fail dyke, turf wall; kens, knows; hause-bane, neck bone; een, eyes; theek, thatch; gowden, golden.
Two crows plan dinner, and in planning it they tell a murder story: the knight lies unburied, and his hound, his hawk and his lady have all moved on, which suggests who killed him. The English ballad Child prints beside it, “The Three Ravens,” is about loyalty. This one is about the opposite, told in rhymed couplets, and its last two lines give the dead man nothing but wind.
Literary ballad examples
From the late eighteenth century, poets wrote ballads on purpose, imitating the old ones. Wordsworth and Coleridge called their 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads, and the form has never gone out of use since. A literary ballad keeps the stanza and the story and usually adds what folk ballads leave out: a frame, a moral, a character's inner life.
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
“By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?
The Bridegroom’s doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May’st hear the merry din.”
He holds him with his skinny hand,
“There was a ship,” quoth he.
“Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!”
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
Coleridge sets his ballad inside a frame story: an old sailor stops a guest on the way to a wedding and makes him listen, and the guest's reactions punctuate the tale. The first version, printed as “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” used deliberately old spelling; Coleridge modernized it and in 1817 added a prose gloss in the margins. The poem runs to 625 lines in seven parts, mostly in ballad stanzas, with some stanzas stretched to five or six lines when the story needs room.
Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
Alone and palely loitering;
The sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
I see a lilly on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever dew;
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
I met a lady in the meads
Full beautiful, a faery’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long;
For sideways would she lean, and sing
A faery’s song.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew;
And sure in language strange she said,
I love thee true.
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she gazed and sighed deep,
And there I shut her wild sad eyes—
So kissed to sleep.
And there we slumbered on the moss,
And there I dreamed, ah woe betide,
The latest dream I ever dreamed
On the cold hill side.
I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
Who cried—“La belle Dame sans merci
Hath thee in thrall!”
I saw their starved lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke, and found me here
On the cold hill side.
And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
Keats drafted the poem in a letter to his brother and sister-in-law in the spring of 1819; that version, the better-known one, opens “O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms.” The text above is his revision, printed in 1820. Either way the technique is the same. The last line of every stanza is cut to two beats, so each stanza ends with a drop, and the poem closes by repeating its opening, which makes the knight's story a loop he can't get out of. The faery lover who ruins men is an old ballad motif; Keats keeps her unexplained.
“What are the bugles blowin’ for?” said Files-on-Parade.
“To turn you out, to turn you out,” the Colour-Sergeant said.
“What makes you look so white, so white?” said Files-on-Parade.
“I’m dreadin’ what I’ve got to watch,” the Colour-Sergeant said.
A regiment is paraded to watch one of its own hanged for killing a sleeping comrade. Kipling tells it like “Lord Randal,” as questions from a young soldier and answers from an old one, across four eight-line stanzas, each closing on a refrain about the hanging. The long lines keep the ballad's beat but stretch it into a march. The poem first appeared in the Scots Observer, then edited by W. E. Henley, whose villanelle is on the villanelle examples page.
He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.
…
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Wilde wrote it in France and Italy after his release from Reading prison, and it was published in February 1898 under the name “C.3.3.,” his cell number. It describes the hanging of Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards, executed at Reading in 1896. The stanza is the ballad quatrain extended to six lines (four, three, four, three, four, three beats, rhymed ABCBDB), and the poem runs to 109 of them in six parts. The second stanza here, with its line about killing the thing you love, is quoted far beyond the poem.
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.
Three metaphors in three lines (a torrent, a galleon, a ribbon) set the scene before any person appears. The long lines mix iambs and anapests, and the short repeated “Riding—riding—” is the hoofbeat. The story that follows is pure ballad: Tim the ostler betrays the highwayman to the redcoats, and Bess, the landlord's daughter, gives her life to warn him. It was collected in Forty Singing Seamen and Other Poems (1907).
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
Printed as eight lines, this is a ballad stanza with a rhyme hidden inside every long line: done and sun, trails and tales, Lights and sights, marge and Lebarge. The extra rhymes make it easy to remember and fun to say aloud. It is a comic tall tale of the Yukon gold rush, and the last line of the stanza gives away the plot without explaining a thing.
“Son,” said my mother,
When I was knee-high,
“You’ve need of clothes to cover you,
And not a rag have I.
“There’s nothing in the house
To make a boy breeches,
Nor shears to cut a cloth with
Nor thread to take stitches.
Thirty short stanzas, mostly quatrains with lines 2 and 4 rhyming, tell a fairy tale of poverty: through a hard winter, a mother sits up one night at her harp and weaves her son the clothes they cannot afford, and in the morning he finds her dead, with the clothes piled beside her. It was one of three works cited when Millay won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, with A Few Figs from Thistles and eight sonnets. Notice the opening: a voice, a time and a problem, all in two lines.
Modern ballads to read next
Twentieth-century poets kept the ballad for stories that needed a plain voice. These are in copyright, so they are named and described rather than quoted.
- Dudley Randall, “Ballad of Birmingham.” His response to the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four girls. A mother keeps her daughter away from a freedom march for safety and sends her to church instead. It uses the mother-and-child dialogue of old ballads like “Lord Randal” and turns it on modern violence.
- Gwendolyn Brooks, “the sonnet-ballad” (in Annie Allen, 1949). A young woman asks her mother what happened to her happiness; her lover has gone to war. A ballad's question, held in a sonnet, one of the hybrids on the sonnet examples page.
- W. H. Auden, “As I Walked Out One Evening.” A lover sings that love will last forever, and the clocks of the city answer him, stanza by stanza, about time.
- Elizabeth Bishop, “The Burglar of Babylon.” A ballad of a fugitive hiding on a hillside above Rio de Janeiro while soldiers hunt him, told in plain quatrains.
Two new ballads
One ghost story and one comic ballad, both written for this page in ballad stanzas of four and three beats.
The rain came down on the county road,
the ditches running deep,
and Danny Shaw drove home alone
and fought to keep from sleep.
And there she stood by the mile marker,
her dress as white as bone,
and Danny stopped, for who would leave
a girl out there alone?
“O where are you going, girl,” he said,
“so late, and in the rain?”
“I’m going home to Orchard Street,
to my mother’s house again.”
She did not speak, she did not sleep,
she would not take his coat;
she watched the dark go by the glass
with one hand at her throat.
He set her down at a yellow house
where the porch light burned all night;
she climbed the steps, she turned, she waved,
and then she was out of sight.
And on the seat where she had sat
there lay a scarf of gray,
and it was wet, and it was cold,
so he drove back next day.
“O have you a daughter, ma’am,” he said,
“with a dress as white as bone?
I gave her a ride on the county road;
she left this, coming home.”
The woman took the scarf from him
and pressed it to her face.
“It’s twenty years this April night
since they found her at that place.
“And every April, when it rains,
some kind man stops to see,
and every year she rides with him
and leaves her scarf with me.”
So if you drive the county road
when April rain comes down,
and a girl in white puts out her hand
a mile outside of town,
O stop for her, and take her home,
and do not ask her why,
for she has walked for twenty years
beneath that April sky.
The vanishing hitchhiker is a modern legend, and the ballad is its natural home. The poem uses the old habits on purpose: it starts in the weather, gives dialogue without tags, repeats a stock phrase (“white as bone”), builds by incremental repetition (“and it was wet, and it was cold”) and never says the word ghost. The hand at her throat in stanza 4 is the only clue before the mother speaks. The last two stanzas turn to the listener, as many folk ballads do.
It fell upon a Thursday night,
and a cold night it was, too,
when the bags were tied and the bins were full
and the truck was due at two.
Said Frank to Rose, “It’s your turn, love.”
Said Rose, “It’s yours, I swear.”
And neither one would move an inch
from the couch or from the chair.
So they made a pact, the two of them,
and they shook on it as well:
whoever spoke the next word first
would carry out the smell.
The clock struck ten, the clock struck twelve,
and neither said a word;
a car went by, a dog barked twice,
and that was all they heard.
Then in there came three fat raccoons
at one o’clock that night,
in through the flap they’d cut for the cat,
and their eyes were green and bright.
They ate the pizza off the stove,
they ate the birthday cake,
and Frank and Rose sat still and watched,
and not a word they spake.
The biggest one climbed up on Frank
and sat upon his knee,
and reached and took the TV remote.
“Get off of that!” cried he.
Then up got Rose, and laughed out loud,
and danced across the floor:
“You spoke the first word, Frank,” she said.
“The bags are by the door.”
A modern version of the old Scottish comic ballad “Get Up and Bar the Door,” in which a husband and wife agree that whoever speaks first must get up and bar the door, and intruders test the bargain. Comic ballads use the same machinery as tragic ones: the formal opening (“It fell upon”), time passing in repeated phrases, a stubborn silence and a sudden reversal. The archaic “spake” is a wink at the source.
How to write a ballad
A ballad is a short story told by a singer who doesn't explain. That makes it good practice for anyone who writes fiction: the same compression a short story needs, with a beat to keep you honest.
- Pick a story with one hard turn
A death, a betrayal, a return, a reversal. Ballads are built around a single event, and the best ones can be summed up in a sentence: the king sends his best sailor out in winter, and the ship goes down.
- Start as late as you can
Open in the middle of the scene, with a person doing something: the king drinking, the knight loitering, the sailor stopping a guest. Cut any stanza that only explains how things got there.
- Write in the ballad stanza and read it aloud
Four beats, three beats, four, three, with lines 2 and 4 rhyming. Count beats, not syllables, and tap them as you read. If a line won't scan, the meter guide shows how to find the stresses.
- Tell it through dialogue and repetition
Let characters speak without tags, and repeat a line with one change each time, the way “Lord Randal” does, so that the repetition itself carries the story forward. A refrain works best when its meaning shifts by the end, which is the same trick the guide to repetition traces through other poems.
- Leave the biggest moment offstage
Skip from the warning to the aftermath, from the ride to the mother's doorstep. End on an image, not a lesson: hats on the water, wind over bones, a scarf on a car seat.
Once a draft is done, ask the Strokes Assistant to point out stanzas that explain what the story has already shown. Those are the first ones to test for a cut.
Folk ballad or literary ballad?
Folk ballad
- Anonymous, passed on by singers before it was written down
- Survives in many versions, often with different endings
- Little description and no inner life; the story moves by dialogue and action
- Examples: “Sir Patrick Spens,” “Lord Randal,” “The Twa Corbies”
Literary ballad
- Written by a known poet, usually to be read
- One fixed text, though poets revise, as Keats and Coleridge did
- Adds a frame, a moral, a mood or a character's feelings
- Examples: Coleridge's Rime, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”
The line between them is blurrier than the table suggests. Kipling and Service wrote for readers, but their ballads were made to be recited aloud, much as the old ones were made to be sung.
Frequently asked questions
What is the rhyme scheme of a ballad?
Usually ABCB: only the second and fourth lines of each quatrain rhyme. Some ballads rhyme ABAB, and some, like "The Twa Corbies," use rhymed couplets. Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" stretches the stanza to six lines rhymed ABCBDB. The rhythm, four beats then three, matters more than the rhyme pattern.
Is a ballad a poem or a song?
Both. Traditional ballads were songs, and many still have tunes. Literary ballads are written to be read but keep the song's beat and repetition. In popular music the word now means something else, a slow, emotional song, usually about love, which has little to do with the narrative ballads on this page.
How long is a ballad?
There is no set length. "The Twa Corbies" tells its story in five stanzas, "Sir Patrick Spens" in eleven, and Coleridge's Rime runs to 625 lines. "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" has 109 six-line stanzas. A first ballad of eight to twelve stanzas is enough to tell a full story.
