#6

I decided to post some information about four-line stanzas. As mentioned in our packet "The History of form", four-lined stanzas are most popular form in the European literature. The most common type of quatrain is the ballad stanzas and thats what i'm going to post information about.
Ballads have strong associations with childhood much children's poetry comes in ballad form, and English poets traditionally associated ballads with their national childhood as well.

Ballads emphasize strong rhythms, repetition of key phrases, and rhymes; if you hear a traditional ballad, you will know that you are hearing a poem. Ballads are meant to be song-like and to remind readers of oral poetry

Ballads do not have the same formal consistency as some other poetic forms, but one can look for certain characteristics that identify a ballad

• Simple language.
• Stories. Ballads tend to be narrative poems, poems that tell stories
• Ballad stanzas. The traditional ballad stanza consists of four lines, rhymed abcb (or sometimes abab--the key is that the second and fourth lines rhyme). The first and third lines have four stresses, while the second and fourth have three.
• Repetition. A ballad often has a refrain, a repeated section that divides segments of the story. Many ballads also employ incremental repetition, in which a phrase recurs with minor differences as the story progresses.
• Third-person objective narration. Ballad narrators usually do not speak in the first person (unless speaking as a character in the story), and they often do not comment on their reactions to the emotional content of the ballad.

I got this information from this address:

http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~simpsone/Connections/Poetry/Forms/ballad1.html