The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Or whatever. Old-fashioned inversions, expletives (both the rude kind and the kind that fill out the metre) and other such archaic tricks considered inadmissible or old-fashioned in serious poetry suit the folksy nature of ballad. The ballad is pub poetry, it is naughty and nautical, crude and carefree. Its elbows are always on the table, it never lowers the seat for ladies after it’s been or covers its mouth when it burps. It can be macabre, brutal, sinister, preachy, ghostly, doom-laden, lurid, erotic, mock-solemn, facetious, pious or obscene–sometimes it exhibits all of those qualities at once. Its voice is often that of the club bore, the drunken rogue, the music hall entertainer or the campfire strummer. It has little interest in descriptions of landscape or the psychology of the individual. Chief among its virtues is a keen passion to tell you a story: it will grab you by the lapels, stare you in the eyes and plunge right in:Now gather round and let me tellThe tale of Danny Wise:And how his sweet wife AnnabelleDid suck out both his eyes.And if I tell the story trueAnd if I tell it clear,There’s not a mortal one of youWon’t shriek in mortal fear.

How could we not want to know more? Did she really suck them out? Was Danny Wise asleep? Was Annabelle a witch? How did it all turn out? Did he get his revenge? Is the teller of the tale poor Danny himself? Sadly, I have no idea because the rest of it hasn’t come to me yet.

While the second and fourth lines should rhyme, the first and third do not need to, it is up to the balladeer to choose, abab or abcb: nor is any regularity or consistency in your rhyme-scheme required throughout, as this popular old ballad demonstrates:In Scarlet Town, where I was born,There was a fair maid dwellin’Made every lad cry wellaway,And her name was Barbara Allen.All in the merry month of May,When green buds they were swellin’,Young Jemmy Grove on his deathbed lay,For love of Barbara Allen.

A quatrain is by no means compulsory, a six-line stanza is commonly found, rhyming xbxbxb, as in Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ and Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol.The Walrus and the CarpenterWere walking close at hand:They wept like anything to seeSuch quantities of sand:‘If this were only cleared away,’They said, ‘it would be grand.’And all men kill the thing they love,By all 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!

Although more ‘literary’ examples may favour a regular accentual-syllabic measure, ballads are perfect examples of accentual verse: it doesn’t matter how many syllables there are, it is the beats that matter. Here is Marriot Edgar’s ‘Albert and the Lion’, which was written as a comic monologue to be recited to a background piano that plunks down its chords on the beats of each four-or three-stress line. Part of the pleasure of this style of ballad is the mad scudding rush of unaccented syllables, the pausing, the accelerations and decelerations: when Stanley Holloway performed this piece, the audience started to laugh simply at his timing of the rhythm. I have marked with underlines the syllables that might receive a little extra push if required: it is usually up to the performer. Recite it as you read.There’s a famous seaside place called Blackpool,That’s noted for fresh-air and fun,And Mr and Mrs RamsbottomWent there with young Albert, their son.A grand little lad was their AlbertAll dressed in his best; quite a swell’E’d a stick with an ’orse’s ’ead ’andleThe finest that Woolworths could sell.

Or there’s Wallace Casalingua’s ‘The Day My Trousers Fell’, which has even more syllables to contend with:Now I trust that your ears you’ll be lending,To this tale of our decadent times;There’s a be ginning, a middle and an endingAnd for the most part there’s rhythms and verses and

rhymes.My name, you must know, is John Weston,Though to my friends I’m Jackie or Jack;I’ve a place on the outskirts of Preston,The tiniest scrap of a garden with a shed and a hammock

round’t back.I was giving the fish girl her payment,The cod were ninety a pound–When, with a snap and a rustle of raimentMy trousers, they dropped to the ground. Con-ster-nation.