Robert Burns poem, "A Red, Red Rose" is written in (b) the
ballad stanza. This stanza is a quatrain, in a form that consists of four and
three-stress lines. And, usually, only the second and fourth lines rhyme. The
traditional rhyme scheme of abcb is followed for two
stanzas. In place of the lines that do not rhyme, assonance is
often used:
readability="5">
That's newly sprung in June [the schwa sound of
vowels is repeated]
In
Burns's poem, which is based upon a folk song that he heard on his travels, there is a
repetition of lines in keeping with the musicality of the poem, much like refrains, but
they are within the stanzas rather than at the ends. In each stanza the second and
fourth lines are in masculine rhyme--the final syllable mimcs the final syllable of
another word.
It is the last stanza that clearly reads like
a ballad with the "fare-thee-weel" of the first line repeated in the second as a
refrain. However, the poem is more that a simple love ballad, as the speaker meditates
upon time--"Till a' the seas gang dry"--he also promises to transcend
time.
No comments:
Post a Comment