![]() ![]() We have selected ten of the most famous ballads here. They usually have a very specific form: quatrains of alternating lines of tetrameter (four feet per line) and trimeter (three feet per line), rhymed abcb. Like epic poems, ballads may be regarded as a subset of narrative poetry. Going back even further, the Descent of Inanna – which predates even Homer by more than a thousand years – is a kind of proto-epic, and a sacred poem to the long-vanished Sumerian civilisation. They are narrative poems, but on an ‘epic’ scale.Īncient Rome has Virgil’s Aeneid, about the Trojan adventurer who, according to legend, travelled to Italy after the Trojan War Greece has Homer’s Iliad, about the war between the Greeks and Trojans and England has Beowulf, one of the earliest Anglo-Saxon poems. But strictly speaking, an epic poem is a long narrative poem dealing with ‘epic’ themes and subject-matter: war, adventure, a clash of civilisations, and many other things.Įpic poems, then, feature extraordinary characters doing extraordinary things, usually with a quick visit to the underworld slotted in somewhere on the itinerary. Some of the oldest poems in various cultures are epics: stories which tell of the founding of a great city or empire, or which provide a shared narrative to bring a particular people together. Agnes’ for a fine example from the era of Romanticism. See John Keats’s great Halloween poem ‘ The Eve of St. What they all have in common is a recognisable story that goes beyond the brief tableau (or series of tableaux) we might get in a lyric poem. This means that some of the greatest narrative poems are fairly long. We have collected some of Crapsey’s best cinquains together in a separate post.Ī narrative poem is, in the broadest sense, any poem which tells a story. Strictly speaking, a cinquain should conform to the ‘rules’ set out by the American poet Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914) in her five-line poems: the first line has one heavy stress, the second line two, and third three, and fourth four, and the fifth and final line has just one heavy stress. ![]() The sestina is possibly even more demanding than the villanelle: put briefly, it consists of six six-line stanzas, with the lines of each stanza ending with the same six words used in rotation: so if the word cold is the last word of the first stanza, cold will also come at the end of the first line of the second stanza, and so on.īut the best way to see how the sestina works is to observe an example: we recommend Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, simply called ‘ Sestina’, which shows how the six repeated words can take on new significance as they are repeated in each stanza. However, the most famous example of a villanelle in English is surely Dylan Thomas’ 1952 poem about his dying father, ‘ Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’, where the two refrains serve as a rallying call to the poet’s father to keep up the fight to the very end. ![]()
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