Narrative poetry tells a story with conflict and characters, often sung for easier memorization. Epics and ballads are common forms, with epic poems describing heroic deeds and ballads covering a wider range of subjects. Lays and idylls also qualify as narrative poetry.
Narrative poetry is poetry with a plot. The content and rhythmic nature of these poems reflect the oral practice that first initiated the narrative tradition. Traditional epics and ballads are the most common forms of narrative poetry, but laymen and some idylls also qualify.
Every narrative poem tells a story with a beginning, middle, and end. The story has an internal or external conflict, along with one or more characters involved in that conflict. Some narrative poems directly describe the setting, but some do not.
Before literacy took hold, storytellers needed to reconstruct tales from memory. Poetic elements — such as meter, rhyme, alliteration, and assonance — helped bards remember the words and events of multiple stories more easily than if those stories had passed only as prose. Narrative poetry was typically sung, giving it a humorous quality. The subjects of these poems included both folk tales told purely for amusement and news concerning important events in other regions.
Epic poems, one of the most common types of narrative poetry, are long poems without stanzas that typically describe serious and heroic deeds. Kings, demigods, warriors, and other noble figures battle for the fate of their culture, country, or world. The Odyssey, an Ancient Greek epic poem attributed to the poet Homer, tells the story of Odysseus, a legendary king of Ithaca, as he fights his way home after the Trojan War. Beowulf, an epic poem composed by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet between AD 700 and 1000, describes three battles fought by Beowulf, a hero and eventually king of the Geats.
The ballad, another type of narrative poetry, is typically shorter than the epic and slightly less serious. Most ballads can be broken up into verses and contain repetitive frames and abrupt transitions. Ballad themes also cover a wider range of subjects than epic themes, including love stories, religious lessons, and adventure tales about folk heroes such as Robin Hood. In modern popular music, however, the term “ballad” more often refers to a type of love song that doesn’t tell a story and doesn’t qualify as narrative poetry.
Lays are long, lighthearted narrative poems that were sung by minstrels and troubadours in the Middle Ages. These poems are related to the form of lyric poetry, and both types of poetry rely heavily on ending rhymes and descriptions of personal feelings and experiences. The text is non-narrative in nature, however, while the layperson tells a story through the use of these feelings and experiences.
An idyll can refer to a short poem that paints a charming picture of rural farm life or a longer poem that tells the story of a past hero. Whether the poet describes the life of a shepherd, a farmer, or a military hero, an idyll that tells a story falls into the category of narrative poetry. If an idyll describes only a rural scene, however, without telling a story about a character within that scene, it is not narrative in nature.
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