The ballad is a form that can easily sound antiquated and sing-song on the page. This is, of course, because “sing-song” isn’t a negative descriptor when describing actual song, and ballads are, indeed, songs. On-the-nose rhyme (knee, three; fall, ball), coupled with end-stopped line endings (pauses in the syntactic flow, often punctuated, at line’s end), and short metrical lines can sound clunky to our contemporary ear when we’re reading a ballad without singing it. The literal music of the ballad complements the literary aspects of the ballad, a kind of leavening agent interacting with the prosody, providing a whole other level of pattern and pleasure. Even inverted grammar (“The day he held up me”) and added filler words (“And over it he gone, gone he”) which contort the sentence to conform to meter and rhyme can feel more at home in song than in the stark light of the page. Even great dance moves can look a little weird if there’s no music playing at the party.
Stripping lyrics of their music is one factor shaping how some ballads can sound to us. Another factor is a contemporary ear shaped by generations of interrogation of “easy” effects in poetry. See Alexander Pope’s An Essay On Criticism for such critique:
And ten low words oft creep in one dull line:
While they ring round the same unvaried chimes,
With sure returns of still expected rhymes;
Wher’er you find “the cooling western breeze”,
In the next line, it “whispers through the trees”;
If crystal streams “with pleasing murmurs creep”,
The reader’s threatened (not in vain) with “sleep”…
…and that was his take on easy prosody and clichéd phrases at the beginning of the 1700s, two hundred years before the Modernists’ aesthetic interventions, and three hundred years before our contemporary context.
But engaging with traditional form enables the contemporary poet to enter centuries-old conversations, tapping into (and subverting) expectations shaped by those traditions. So what makes for a satisfying “unsung” contemporary poem in the ballad tradition? There are, of course, many answers to this, but when my students ask how to make their forays into the ballad form feel more “contemporary,” there are a few answers that come immediately to mind: contemporary diction and subject matter; syntax that flows like natural speech and doesn’t invert itself to “fit” the meter; the sense that all words and lines and rhymes are necessary to the work of the larger poem and aren’t simply included for the sake of the prosody; a full spectrum of techniques of rhyme, not simply the most obvious and oft-used pairs of perfect rhyme; and enough enjambment to subvert expectation and create a fulfilling tension between line rhythms and sentence rhythms.
In past posts, I’ve explored one of my favorite modern ballads, Robert Hayden’s “The Ballad of Nat Turner.” One of the best examples of a more contemporary ballad is Joshua Mehigan’s “The Orange Bottle.” The lilting song-like quality of the prosody plays beautifully off of the subject matter of control (and lack of control) in our medicated (which also means over-medicated and under-medicated and mis-medicated and side-effected) culture. The poem’s a candy-coated juggernaut, a music-box possessed. Read it in its (long) entirety for the full effect.
While it’s not technically a ballad, Erica Dawson’s “Langston Hughes’s Grandma Mary Writes a Love Letter to Lewis Leary Years after He Dies Fighting at Harper’s Ferry” is another amazing contemporary example of song-like prosody alive and well on the page. Like a ballad, Dawson’s poem employs rhyming quatrains and rough three or four beat lines. The difference is really just in the rhyme scheme—where ballads are ABCB or ABAB, this poem’s rhyme scheme is ABBA, also called “envelope rhyme,” a touching decision in a poem written as a persona poem love letter to “My dearest, sweetest Lew.” Toward the end, one finds the rhetoric of this rhyme scheme echoed in other figures; speaking of “this letter,” Grandma Mary writes to Lew:
I am its two dimensions:
Two praying hands, my skirt
Pressed to my thighs pressed closed.
Dawson’s enjambment at the end of her second stanza shows the possibilities inherent in dissonant lineation:
I’ve lost all semblance of “I’m fine.”
So I say damn the freeWater beneath the thick
Ice spots on the Cuyahoga and Lake
Erie . . .
Here, the prosody holds “So I say damn the free” as its own sentiment for one blasphemous moment, resonant in an address to a husband who died for the cause of abolition, before “free” as noun tumbles back to “free” as adjective simply describing the water in the next stanza. Prosody enables us to keep both possibilities, even as the sentence clarifies its intentions. Here, form opens up possibilities, complications, and contradictions—its restrictions enable the poem to make more meaning. To “make it new” is always a challenge in poetry, and even more so when entering the long history of a formal tradition. It’s thrilling to inhabit this challenge in the work of Mehigan and Dawson. While their poems don’t set up the expectation that readers should sing along, there is certainly a participatory pleasure in the traditions and subversions enacted in these works. And without musical accompaniment urging us forward, we can linger at and return to the (many) moments of tension, beauty, and surprise therein.