: Re: What is a ballad? I've always wanted to write poetry, and I tried my hand at a ballad today. However, I know very little about the technicalities of poetry, and the explanations of iambic

@Speyer920

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Technically, a ballad is a collection of four-line verses that follow a specific rhyming pattern. These can be any of the following:

abac - first and third line rhyme
aabb - first and second line rhyme, and the third and fourth have a different rhyme
abcb - second and fourth line rhyme
abab - first and third line rhyme, and the second and fourth have a different rhyme

Sometimes you may see a ballad with six or eight-line verses, but the four-line verse is by far the most common.
Another distinguishing factor of the ballad is the meter that is used in each verse. The easiest way to understand meter is the natural rise and fall of the emphasis placed on each syllable or word. Here is an example I created with the emphasized words or syllables in bold font:

I wrote a poem yesterday
To show how it was done.
I didn't have too much to say.
I did it just for fun.

This particular example uses a 4-3-4-3 meter, which means that the first line has four emphasized points, the second has three, the third has four, and the fourth has three. Another form of ballad might have a 4-4-4-4 meter, which means that each line has four points of emphasis.
As long as your poem is structured in this way, with four lines in each section and each section following the same rhyming pattern and the same meter, then you have a properly formed ballad. From a technical perspective, your poem is a properly formed ballad.
Getting a ballad structured properly can be a fun challenge, but the real challenge is getting the words to flow naturally so that the reader doesn't think about the rise and fall within each line. You were doing fine until you got to the third line in the next to last verse: "the memories he had consumed". A lot of people will read "memories" as two syllables instead of three, so I felt a little tripped up there. When I read it again and forced the three syllables it worked, technically, but it didn't have the natural flow.
If you can structure it properly and get it to flow naturally, then you can go from having a properly formed ballad to having a really good ballad.

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