Glossary of Poetic Terms from BOB'S BYWAY, Letter B

GLOSSARY OF POETIC TERMS from

B

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BACCHIUS ( ba-KEE-us)
In classical poetry, a metrical foot consisting of a short syllable followed by two long syllables.

BALLAD
A short narrative poem with stanzas of two or four lines and usually a refrain. The story of a ballad can originate from a wide range of subject matter but frequently deals with folk-lore or popular legends. The plot is the dominant element, dealing with a single crucial episode, narrated impersonally, with frequent use of repetition. They are written in straight-forward verse, seldom with detail, but always with graphic simplicity and force. Most ballads are suitable for singing and, while sometimes varied in practice, are generally written in ballad meter, i.e., alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, with the last words of the second and fourth lines rhyming, an xbyb rhyme scheme.
Sidelight: Many old-time ballads were written and performed by minstrels attached to noblemen's courts. Folk ballads are of unknown origin and are usually lacking in artistic finish. Meant to be sung, but often studied as poetry, the texts are independent of the melodies, which are often used for a number of different ballads. Because they are handed down by oral tradition, folk ballads are subject to variations and continual change. Other types of ballads include those transferred from rural to urban settings, and literary ballads, combining the natures of epic and lyric poetry, which are written by known authors, often in the style and form of the folk ballad, such as Keats' "La Belle Dame sans Merci" or Scott's "Jock o' Hazeldean."
(See also Broadside Ballad, Lay, Tragedy)
(Compare Chanson de Geste, Common Measure, Epopee, Epos, Heroic Quatrain)

BALLADE (ba-LAHD)
Frequently represented in French poetry, a fixed form consisting of three seven or eight-line stanzas using no more than three recurrent rhymes, with an identical refrain after each stanza and a closing envoi repeating the rhymes of the last four lines of the stanza. A variation containing six stanzas is called a double ballade.
Sidelight: The ballade was prominent in French literature from the 14th to the 16th century and was favored by many poets, including Francois Villon, for example, in poems such as "Des Dames du Temps Jadis." In the nineteenth century it was popular with poets like Verlaine and Baudelaire. In English literature, Chaucer wrote ballades and some late-nineteenth century poets also used the form.

(Compare Chant Royale)

BALLAD METER
See Ballad

BARD
An ancient composer, singer or declaimer of epic verse.
Sidelight: Today the term is popularly applied to poets of significant repute
as a title of honor, with William Shakespeare being known as "The Bard of
Avon" and Robert Burns as "The Bard of Ayrshire."
(See also Metrist, Poet, Sonneteer, Versifier, Wordsmith)
(Compare Minstrel, Troubadour)

BAROQUE (buh-ROHK)
An elaborate, extravagantly complex, sometimes grotesque, style of artistic expression prevalent in the late 16th to early 18th centuries. The baroque influence on poetry was expressed by Euphuism in England, Marinism in Italy, and Gongorism in Spain.

BATHOS
An unintentional shift from the sublime to the ridiculous which can result from the use of overly elevated language to describe trivial subject matter, or from an exaggerated attempt at pathos which misfires to the point of being ludicrous. Bathos can be viewed as an unintentional anticlimax.

BEAST FABLE or BEAST EPIC
See under Fable

BINARY METER
A meter which has two syllables per foot, as in iambic, trochaic, pyrrhic, and spondaic meters. Binary meters are sometimes referred to as duple or double meters.
(Compare Ternary Meter)

BLANK VERSE
Poetry written without rhymes, but which retains a set metrical pattern, usually iambic pentameter (five iambic feet per line) in English verse. Since it is a very flexible form, the writer not being hampered in the expression of thought or syntactic structure by the need to rhyme, it is used extensively in narrative and dramatic poetry. In lyric poetry, blank verse is adaptable to lengthy descriptive and meditative poems. An example of blank verse is found in the well-known lines from Act 4, Scene 1 of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice:
The qua | lity | of mer | cy is | not strain'd,
It drop | peth as | the gen | tle rain | from heaven
Upon | the place | beneath; | it is | twice blest:
It bles | seth him | that gives | and him | that takes;

Sidelight: Blank verse and free verse are often misunderstood or confused. A good way to remember the difference is to think of the word blank as meaning that the ends of the lines where rhymes would normally appear are "blank," i.e., devoid of rhyme; the free in free verse refers to the freedom from fixed patterns of traditional versification.
(See also Verse Paragraph)

BOUTS-RIMES (boo-REEM)
An 18th century parlor game in which a list of rhyming words was drawn up and handed to the players, who had to make a poem from the list keeping the rhymes in their original order.
(See also Crambo)

BRETON LAY
See Lay

BROADSIDE BALLAD
A ballad written in doggerel, printed on a single piece of paper and sold for a penny or two on English street corners in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The name of the tune to which they were to be sung was indicated on the sheet. The subject matter of broadside ballads covered a wide range of current, historical, or simply curious events and also extended to moral exhortations and religious propaganda.
Sidelight: The rogue, Autolycus, in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, is a peddler whose wares include broadside ballads.

BROKEN RHYME
Also called split rhyme, a rhyme produced by dividing a word at the line break to make a rhyme with the end word of another line. In Hopkins' "The Windhover," for example, he divided kingdom at the end of the first line to rhyme with the word wing ending the fourth line.

BUCOLIC
Derived from the Greek word for herdsman, an ancient term for a poem dealing with a pastoral subject.

(See also Arcadia, Eclogue, Idyll, Madrigal)

BURDEN
The central topic or principle idea, often repeated in a refrain.
(See also Motif, Theme)

BURLESQUE
A work which is intended to ridicule by the use of grotesque exaggeration or by the treatment of a trifling subject with the gravity due a matter of great importance.
(See also Hudibrastic Verse, Lampoon, Mock Epic, Parody, Pasquinade, Satire)
(Compare Antiphrasis, Irony, Purple Patch)

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'T is the heart's current lends the cup its glow,
Whate'er the fountain whence the draught may flow.

---Oliver Wendell Holmes

Great thoughts come from the heart.

---Marquis of Vauvenargues