While ballads can be as long or short as a writer desires, the ballad stanza is more straightforward to quantify. The typical stanza is a quatrain -- that is, it has four lines -- and the second and fourth lines rhyme. The first and third lines usually have four stressed syllables, while the second and fourth lines have three. The first stanza of the Scottish ballad “Sir Patrick Spens” exemplifies this pattern: “The king sits in Dumferling towne, / Drinking the blude-red wine: / ‘O whar will I get a guid sailor, / To sail this schip of mine?’”
Folk ballads, or popular ballads, were traditionally communicated orally, like other kinds of folk songs. They range from a few stanzas to over 50 stanzas long. M.H. Abrams describes their narrative voice as “dramatic, condensed, and impersonal,” jumping right into the central action as “Sir Patrick Spens” does and using vivid imagery rather than long descriptions. Like most songs, folk ballads use stock phrases and repetition to help listeners remember and recite the story. For example, the fourth line of every stanza in folk ballads is often the same, or nearly so.
Out of the folk ballad tradition grew the great literary ballads of the 19th century. Many of these ballads preserved the stanzaic form and narrative style of their folk counterparts, but because these were read rather than set to music, memorization was no limit on length. One of the best-known ballads of the Romantic period, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” is 626 lines long. However, many are far briefer, such as John Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci” or William Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven.”
A host of musical artists in the U.S. have written songs in the ballad tradition, again varying in length. These songs were particularly popular in the 1960s and '70s social protest movements. Joan Baez’s nine-stanza “Barbara Allen” closely follows the ballad form, as does Bob Dylan’s 30-stanza “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” and Woody Guthrie’s 11-stanza song “Pretty Boy Floyd”: “Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered, / I’ve seen lots of funny men; / Some will rob you with a six-gun, / And some with a fountain pen.”