Ballad-ish: On Common Meter

In a past life, I played the fiddle. There’s an old joke that goes “what’s the difference between a violin and a fiddle? One has strings and the other has strangs.” In other words, a violin is what you play when you’re playing classical music. A fiddle is for folk music even as the instrument itself is exactly the same. I stopped playing the fiddle my freshman year of college, around the same time I discovered poetry, though not before I had earned myself the title of “girl who used to play the fiddle on the steps of her dorm.” I wasn’t embarrassed about my past life—I had simply gone full steam ahead into a new one, as a black-wearing, cigarette-smoking, wine-drinking poet. But the rhythms of past lives have a way of making their way into present ones.

I began writing the poems that became my first collection, Songs & Ballads, one jet-lagged and restless night when I was supposed to be writing a dissertation. In my head, suddenly I began to see—to picture—empty rectangular boxes, outlines waiting to be filled in with four-line stanzas. I drew the boxes down the page, filling in the end words as I went, sometimes using rhyme and sometimes just patterns of repeating words. It was all very mysterious, both this new form and the way it came to me; never had a form appeared to me so suddenly or so insistently. Of course I’d written sonnets before, and I’d written poems in quatrains. These new poems, though, were not so much structured into quatrains as they were driven by quatrains, or powered by them, as if the quatrain itself generated the poem. Each new stanza felt like a new breath. Here, for example, are the book’s first two stanzas, from “Risk Management Song”:

so we commissioned a document
about sustenance and the city’s pores
metaphors of food and skin
for when the water rises

wired the desirable apartments
caves in units, strange hotels
possible domesticities
before the water rises

The structure of this poem, which is very loosely about catastrophe, is a refrain: each quatrain ends with something about water rising. Every stanza break is the end of a sustained phrase, a place to pause and gulp a little bit of air before the next breath. Through the irregularities of these lines, there’s also the beat of a regular rhythm. Imagine tapping your foot as you speak the lines: of the four lines in the quatrain, three of them would get four taps, or four stresses, and one final line would get three. (In the parlance of prosody, the technical study of poetic rhythm, this would be described as three tetrameter lines and one trimeter line—“tetra,” for four stresses, and “tri,” for three.)

I was too busy writing the poems in my first collection to wonder where they came from. But once I did, the answer wasn’t hard to find. I grew up singing in the Presbyterian church, and I used to love “Amazing Grace” in particular. I can’t really sing “Risk Management Song” to the tune of “Amazing Grace,” but the rhythm is similar, as is the breath-driven quatrain structure. My book, I realized, came straight out of hymns and folk tunes.

The kind of quatrain that alternates between three- and four-beat lines in English has a few names, including “ballad meter,” “hymn meter,” and “common meter.” Leaving distinctions between these meters aside for now, common it is: “Amazing Grace,” your average sea chanty, even “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”—which is also the alphabet song—are all examples of the broad category. In fact, my poem “Ballad of Salthill” (written for the seaside suburb of Galway, Ireland, in which I was living when I wrote most of it) is technically written in “long meter” rather than “ballad meter.” Long meter is a common meter variation—there are four lines with four stresses in every stanza, not three lines with four stresses and one line with three stresses. But I didn’t think about this when I titled the poem. It felt like a ballad, and it became one. Besides, poets have been messing with metrical technicalities like this for centuries. In general, poetry works against any rigid universal application of formal definitions, so it is not surprising that many of my favorite ballad-ish stanzas buck the rules, as I do. I like to think about it this way: the ballad-ish stanza is basically a quatrain that you can beat out on the table, probably with some combination of three- or four-stress lines. 

Let me offer a few examples of the ballad-ish stanza that are diverse in theme and tone but united in the way they take expectations of a regular, predictable music and subvert them. Emily Dickinson might be the queen of the slant-rhymed ballad-ish stanza that I love so much, in poems like “I dwell in Possibility—” or “There’s a certain Slant of light.” Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire takes the regularity of the ballad stanza and sonically explodes it in poems such as “Ballad in A.” From John Keats, I learned something about the power of tiny variations, and I often have some version of the music of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” in my head:

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
      Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
      And no birds sing.

This quatrain is an object lesson in the devastating power of wonky poetic meter. In the final line, “And no birds sing,” we’re missing the syllables that help move the other lines along. Even without any complex metrical analysis, you can feel the way this line is stripped bare, shorter than expected—“no birds sing,” and the music of the poem itself tends toward silence. The poem tells you that the world’s fallen silent and makes you feel it. 

As a final example, here is, in its entirety, Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till,” which haunts me always:

Emmett’s mother is a pretty-faced thing;
           the tint of pulled taffy.
She sits in a red room,
           drinking black coffee.
She kisses her killed boy.
           And she is sorry.
Chaos in windy grays
           through a red prairie.

This is another instance of music gone silent—in this case, reflecting a truncated life; the rest of the ballad is missing. In what remains of it, the rhythm and sound of the words work to make a mother’s grief felt. Brooks writes a broken ballad-ish stanza, each of its four lines split in the middle. It starts out a little off-kilter, like someone drawing a shuddery breath after crying, or like a funeral hymn sung through tears. But what moves me the most are its off-rhymes: taffy, coffee, sorry, prairie. Some of the poem’s great power comes from these rhymes, and the grief and wildness of them, the way they refuse to resolve at all into neat, expected patterns of sound but instead remain ragged, opening onto more grief and wildness.

What’s most interesting to me with a ballad-ish poem is when the regularity of its rhythm comes into contact with other voices, traditions, sounds, ways of making poetry. Still, there’s something fundamental—like a heartbeat or a nursery rhyme—about the beating, ballad-ish quatrain. Perhaps it’s what poet and scholar Susan Stewart describes in her essay “Lyric Possession” as the quality of being “radically haunted by others.” The ballad-ish stanza sounds like something someone sang to you once, a long time ago, or something that came to you in a dream. It’s a snippet of a song you forgot you knew, or it’s a little beating heart in a box.