Hello all, Björn here 

Today I thought we would write form with meter and most of all rhythm.

I hope you are all familiar with meter and feet. To me the meter is what brings rhythm to a piece of poetry, and maybe most of all what makes it possible to sing. What is amazing with the ballad is that if you follow the form I am sure you will find a melody to fit it. Which was often how songs were known in the past. 

It is still so that many well known songs we have today are written to melodies already known. One of the reasons was that it was much more expensive to print notes than text since text can be typeset, but the notes had to be set by engraving an image.

The topic was often newsworthy and published as broadside ballads. That way they could be sung for an audience and with a story to tell. 

A special subcategory are the so-called murder ballads telling stories of gruesome deaths and murders. 

With that let’s move on to the ballad. Tony did this form back in 2013, and I have not seen it since, but as it was presented I have returned to it from time to time. 

I wrote this ballad for example a year ago.

The winding way

We never went the winding way
that would have led us right
we tried to run, to circle back
but nowhere there was light

We failed to see and now we’re caught
inside this mesh, this maze
without the moon or stars, true north
is lost, our mood is grey.

We did not know, we were naive
to trust the preacher’s road
we passed the crossroad, now it’s late
we’re lost because we bowed.

When you read it you can easily find the rhythm as I have bolded in the first stanza, and as you can see it has an alternating 4 and 3 beats. 

As is often the case you may write this purely with iambs, but as a matter of fact you may choose any type of feet. You will get extra points for writing it with anapests. As for rhyme scheme you may either rhyme it as x-a-x-a or as a-b-a-b. 

When you have written your ballad for the prompt, post it to your blog and link back to this post. Link it up to Mr Linky below where you will also find all the other entries that you can visit and leave a nice comment and remember to have fun.

July 23, 2026