Virginia Lucas Poetry Scrapbook

Formal Description of Ballad of the Tempest

            James. T. Fields’ poem "Ballad of The Tempest" contains six stanzas.  It is clearly from the title that this poem follows a ballad format written in four-line stanzas of consistent trimeter. The poem sounds vivid when read aloud, thanks to its unusual meter. Each line contains three feet and combines anapests with iambic feet. For instance, the first line starts with two unstressed sounds, "we" and "were" followed by a stressed sound, “CROWD.” Together these make an anapestic foot. The following syllables, “ed IN the CAbin” follow an iambic meter (with an extra tag at the end of the line). The line endings are mixed with heavy and light stresses throughout the poem which as known as masculine and feminine endings. For instance, the second and the fourth line end with “sleep” and “deep” representing a masculine ending; the fifth and seventh line end with “winter” and “trumpet” representing a feminine ending. At the end of line seven and the beginning of line eight, Fields uses a technique called enjambment. He carries the word "trumpet" to the next line so that it becomes "trumpet Thunder". Fields puts them into separate lines to keep the poem’s meter identical throughout. 
            The rhyme of this poem is not traditional as well. It rhymes in the lines with even numbers, and the other lines do not rhyme. The poem forms an ABCB rhyme pattern, and the end rhymes change in every stanza. The examples of the rhyming syllables are "sleep" and "deep," "blast," and "mast." 
            Fields used a common sound strategy called alliteration for the poem's sound. This is a technique that repeats the same letter sound in one line. For example, the words "Crowded" and "Cabin", "Soul" and "Sleep" are alliterations in the first two lines of the poem. Fields also used another technique called assonance which the vowel sounds repeat along the same line. The words “shattered” and “blast” in line six and “little” and “whispered” in line thirteen demonstrate this technique from this poem.