Verse manuals exist to explain poetic forms, but poetic forms, when competently executed, generally explain themselves. Whatever its conscious subject, the villanelle is always announcing its patterns of repeated rhyming lines. The sestina makes clear its rota of six end words. What the sonnet says, on the front end, is, “Hey, look, fourteen lines.” But by the end of the first quatrain, the careful reader will have no trouble in identifying what kind of sonnet it is, or else how it varies from its menu of expected options. The form itself makes everything plain.

So you don’t have to be a scholar to know the rules of the ballade. You simply have to be paying attention, particularly when something announces itself, in its very title, to be a ballade. Consider, for example, today’s Poem of the Day by Dorothy Parker (1893–1967), whose birthday is today. We recognize it as classic Dorothy Parker, taking up the same bitter theme of unhealed heartbreak, the vein of determinedly cynical pathos that runs through such poems as “Convalescent” and “Now at Liberty,” which have previously appeared in the Sun. But reading this poem, we also learn (if we didn’t already know) how the ballade operates. 

After all, Parker’s genius as a darkly comic poet lies in her tensile mastery of form as much as in her wit. With the authority of that mastery behind it, “Ballade of a Great Weariness” tells you nothing you didn’t already know about Dorothy Parker on failed love, but everything about the ballade and its behaviors. You see clearly the obsessive rhyme scheme, repeated through three octets, the last line of each octet a refrain. Generally the ballade’s rhyme scheme is ababbcbc, but Parker, doing away with the c rhyme, has tightened the screws and out-balladed the ballade, with a scheme of ababbaba. You see, too, how the envoi’s quatrain finishes things like a mad chorus. Repeating the rhyme scheme, it drives the refrain home, one last time, like a stake through the heart. 

Ballade of a Great Weariness
by Dorothy Parker

There’s little to have but the things I had,
    There’s little to bear but the things I bore.
There’s nothing to carry and naught to add,
    And glory to Heaven, I paid the score.
There’s little to do but I did before,
    There’s little to learn but the things I know;
And this is the sum of a lasting lore:
    Scratch a lover, and find a foe.

And couldn’t it be I was young and mad
    If ever my heart on my sleeve I wore?
There’s many to claw at a heart unclad,
    And little the wonder it ripped and tore.
There’s one that’ll join in their push and roar,
    With stories to jabber, and stones to throw;
He’ll fetch you a lesson that costs you sore —
    Scratch a lover, and find a foe.

So little I’ll offer to you, my lad;
    It’s little in loving I set my store.
There’s many a maid would be flushed and glad,
    And better you’ll knock at a kindlier door.
I’ll dig at my lettuce, and sweep my floor —
    Forever, forever I’m done with woe —
And happen I’ll whistle about my chore,
    “Scratch a lover, and find a foe.”

                                    L’ENVOI:

Oh, beggar or prince, no more, no more!
    Be off and away with your strut and show.
The sweeter the apple, the blacker the core —
    Scratch a lover, and find a foe!

___________________________________________
With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.