Ballads, Aubades, Elegies.

Ballad: recounts a story, generally a dramatic episode and uses a ballad stanza (a quatrain with abab rhyme scheme that is somewhat sing-songy, though the rhyme could be approximate rhyme rather than perfect rhyme). The ballad usually contains refrains, repetitions of phrases or lines, dialogue, characters, simple and impersonal language. The most famous "literary ballad" is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798) which can be found here.

John Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane" and Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." also contain features of a traditional ballad.



Aubade: a lyrical/love poem delivered at dawn generally involving lovers who must part. Examples include the following:

The Sun Rising

by John Donne



Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows and through curtains call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys, and sour ’prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the King will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long :
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late tell me,
Whether both the Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left’st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday
And thou shalt hear, ‘All here in one bed lay.’

She’s all States, and all Princes I ;
Nothing else is.
Princes do play us ; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic ; all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere.


Elegy: Typically a poem that laments the loss of something or someone.

Example: Dylan Thomas, "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London"

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.


If you're having trouble with these definitions you can go to THE GLOSSARY OF POETIC TERMS for help.