Ballad enjoys a very long history. The word comes from the Latin and Italian “ballare” meaning “to dance." Originally, the anonymous folk ballads were sung as accompaniment to dances, passed along orally, and changed in transmission. A ballad is a short simple narrative poem often relating a dramatic event.
Any poem is in a sense lyrical, and sometimes writings other than poetry that are smoothly structured and intimately presented are described as lyrical. In Greek a "lyric" is a song to be accompanied with a lyre. This reminds one of the musical quality of poetry. Usually, a lyric is short, within fifty or sixty lines. Lyrics treat the thoughts and feelings, usually powerful emotions of the poet or some invented speaker. They adopt various tones, but frequently personal and reflective ones.
A poem mainly tells a relatively complete story, it is called a narrative poem. Narrative poems are widespread in many literatures and continue to be written and read. Noteworthy examples from the English language are Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Marine”.
An epic is a long narrative poem of great scale and grandiose style about the heroes who are usually warriors or even demigods. Like tragedy defined by Aristotle, the epic deals with noble characters and heroic deeds.
An ode is a dignified and elaborately structured lyric poem of some length, praising and glorifying an individual, commemorating an event, or describing nature intellectually rather than emotionally.
Blank verse refers to poems of unrhymed lines, usually written in iambic pentameter. Because the poems are unrhymed, the rhyme scheme is “blank,” hence the name.
Free verse is rhymed or unrhymed poetry free from conventional rules of meter. The aesthetic and musical effect of free verse is achieved through rhythms and cadence of natural speech. Poets famous for their works composed in free verse include Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound. T S. Eliot, Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg. The King James Bible is also labeled as free verse.
Tone is poise, mood, voice, attitude and outlook of the poet. Conveniently tone can be defined as the poet's or the speaker’s attitude towards his subject, his audience, or even himself. Through the tone of a poem, the poet may even show his own personality.
The poet’s business is to evoke such sense impressions in the reader's mind. His method is usually to describe these things in words, or so to speak, to paint word pictures. Such a word picture is an image. Image is the representation of sense experience through language. All the images formed into a meaningful whole in a poem are often called its imagery. Obviously, image is the soul of poetry as language is the body of poetry.
Theme is defined as a main idea or an underlying meaning of a literary work, which may be stated directly or indirectly.
1. rhyme scheme;
2. perfect rhyme;
3. masculine;
4. feminine;
5. Eye rhymes;
6. Tail rhyme;
7. Internal rhyme;
8. consonance;
9. alliteration;
10. assonance
1. paradox
2. extended metaphor
3. paradox
4. ambiguity
5. onomatopoeia
6. symbol
7. simile
8. metaphor
9. symbol
10. personification
“A Red, Red Rose” begins with a quatrain containing two similes. Burns compares his love with a springtime blooming rose and then with a sweet melody. These are popular poetic images and this is the stanza most commonly quoted from the poem.
The second and third stanzas become increasingly complex, ending with the metaphor of the “sands of life,” or hourglass. One the one hand we are given the image of his love lasting until the seas run dry and the rocks melt with the sun, wonderfully poetic images. On the other hand Burns reminds us of the passage of time and the changes that result. That recalls the first stanza and its image of a red rose, newly sprung in June, which we know from experience will change and decay with time. These are complex and competing images, typical of the more mature Robert Burns.
The final stanza wraps up the poem’s complexity with a farewell and a promise of return.
“A Red, Red Rose” is written as a ballad with four stanzas of four lines each. Each stanza has alternating lines of four beats, or iambs, and three beats. The first and third lines have four iambs, consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, as in da-dah, da-dah, da-dah, da-dah. The second and fourth lines consist of three iambs. This form of verse is well adapted for singing or recitation and originated in the days when poetry existed in verbal rather than written form.