larryhammer: a wisp of smoke, label: "it comes in curlicues, spirals as it twirls" (twirls)
[personal profile] larryhammer
When you are reading a collection of ballads, bounding along through “Earl Mar’s Daughter” and “The Twa Sisters” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well” then suddenly come BLAM! up against “A Lyke-Wake Dirge,” it becomes all the more obvious that while this has the form of a ballad—ballad stanzas with refrain lines—it is not a ballad in genre.* It’s moralizing framed as instructions for a newly dead soul. It’s didactic, not narrative.

Similarly, there are many poems that use the same form as a haiku, but are not a haiku in genre.


* And if it’s immediately followed by “The Douglas Tragedy” and “Fair Annie,” you know the editor Doesn’t Get This.


---L.

Subject quote from Kemp Owyne, immediately before “Earl Mar’s Daughter” in the collection.

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