Poetry form Week 37 on BalladE

Reference: www.poets.org  (16 years of excellence, Happy Birthday! ;))

Poetic Form: Ballade   

The ballade (NOT ballad) was one of the principal forms of rhythmic and poetry in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France.  It contains three main stanzas, each with the same rhyme scheme, plus a shorter concluding stanza, or envoi. All four stanzas have identical final refrain lines. The tone of the ballade was often solemn and formal, with elaborate symbolism and classical references.

One of the most influential writers of early ballades was François Villon. He used the exacting form and limited rhyme scheme to create intense compositions about poverty and the frailty of life. In English, ballades were written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth-century, and revived by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne in the nineteenth-century. Aside from adaptations of Villon composed by Ezra Pound, there are few modern examples of the ballade and it is  often reserved for light verse.

Example of The Poetry Form BalladE

The goat scratches so much it can't sleep 

Written by François Villon
translated by Galway Kinnell

The goat scratches so much it can't sleep

The pot fetches water so much it breaks

You heat iron so much it reddens

You hammer it so much it cracks

A man's worth so much as he's esteemed

He's away so much he's forgotten

He's bad so much he's hated

We cry good news so much it comes.

You talk so much you refute yourself

Fame's worth so much as its perquisites

You promise so much you renege

You beg so much you get your wish

A thing costs so much you want it

You want it so much you get it

It's around so much you want it no more

We cry good news so much it comes.

You love a dog so much you feed it

A song's loved so much as people hum it

A fruit is kept so much it rots

You strive for a place so much it's taken

You dawdle so much you miss your chance

You hurry so much you run into bad luck

You grasp so hard you lose your grip

We cry good news so much it comes.

You jeer so much nobody laughs

You spend so much you've lost your shirt

You're honest so much you're broken

"Take it" is worth so much as a promise

You love God so much you go to church

You give so much you have to borrow

The wind shifts so much it blows cold

We cry good news so much it comes.

Prince a fool lives so much he grows wise

He travels so much he returns home

He's beaten so much he reverts to form

We cry good news so much it comes.

Image Credit: Google.com....

Poetry Form Week 29

The Horatian ode 

The Horatian ode is a short lyric poem written in stanzas of two or four lines in the manner of the 1st-century-bc Latin poet Horace.   The structure of the Horatian ode is less complex than the more technically structured for that the poet Pindar used for his prose though in the emulation of Pindaric odes the focus is on the events or circumstances of a happening. Horace’s odes are considered to be intimate and reflective, dealing often with friendship, love and the practice with a sense that they were written to a friend. To emulate Horace’s ode style does not require the rigidity of the Pindaric ode, the poet can create their own stanzas, meters and rhyming patterns, with only stern stipulation being that the structure must be repeated in each succeeding stanza.

 The Ship of State (Odes I, 14)

Quintus Horatius Flaccus

On Ship! New billows sweep thee out

Seaward. What wilt thou? Hold the port, be stout
See'st not thy mast
How rent by stiff Southwestern blast?

Thy side, of rowers how forlorn?

Thine hull, with groaning yards, with rigging torn,
Can ill sustain
The fierce, and ever fiercer main;

Thy gods, no more than sails entire,

From whom yet once they need might aid require,
Oh Pontic Pine,
The first of woodland stocks is thine.

Yet race and name are but as dust,

Not painted sterns gave storm-tost seamen trust;
Unless thou dare
To be the sport of storms, beware.

O fold at best a weary weight,

A yearning care and constant strain of late,
O shun the seas
That girt those glittering Cyclades

Ode to the West Wind

Percy Bysshe Shelley

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-striken multitudes! O thou
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odors plain and hill:
Wild Spirit which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!