mutable, unstable genres." (5) Martin shows that what we now call "the"
ballad stanza was only one of a range of
ballad stanzas recognized by mid-Victorian poets, prosodists, and readers; to supplement Martin's reading with an additional example, witness the opening lines of Newman's ballad translation of Book I of the Iliad:
More significantly McKay's conjunction of dialect and traditional prosody both denaturalizes dialect, rendering it a linguistic mode no less artificial, no more authentic, than standard English or the
ballad stanza, and defamiliarizes and re-forms "English" poetry and poetic language.
This observation can be extended from rhymes to line length as well which, in turn, may throw the so-called
ballad stanza, for instance (where a longer line alternates with a shorter one), into a new perspective.
Not one to kowtow to authority, Trower wields the
ballad stanza like a fine old rust-flecked sword.
Add to this the historical resonance of a poem's genre--the sonnet, the
ballad stanza, blank verse, among many others--and the levels of meaning multiply.
Where Southey occasionally alters the traditional four-line stanza by adding an extra line or two, Zukovskij never varies from the traditional four-line
ballad stanza. Once again, Zukovskij insists upon concreteness.
The hymn stanza grew out of the
ballad stanza: four beats, three beats, four beats, three beats in alternating isochronous lines of varying numbers of syllables locked in a rhyming quatrain.
I begin with a
ballad stanza spoken by Ophelia, which Percy incorporated virtually unchanged into "The Friar of Orders Gray," a poem mostly his own, which he included in the section of his Reliques, "Ballads that Illustrate Shakespeare":
ballad stanza A verse stanza common in English ballads that consists of two lines in ballad meter, usually printed as a four-line stanza with a rhyme scheme of abcb, as in The Wife of Usher's Well, which begins:
This discord in the
ballad stanza signals the onset of violence.