Thomas Campbell, Lord Ullin's Daughter

Sound features
6. Work out the poem’s rhyme scheme.
7. Look at the main stresses in stanza 1.
a. How many stresses are there in each line
´ ´ ´ ´
A chieftain, to the Highlands bound,
´ ´ ´
Cries, “Boatman, do not tarry!
´ ´ ´ ´
And I’ll give thee a silver pound
´ ´ ´
To row us o’er the ferry!” —
b. Which of these statements is true The poem alternates …
a. … lines of pentameter and tetrameter.
b. … lines of tetrameter and trimeter.
c. … lines of trimeter and dimeter.
c. Can you identify the same stress pattern in other stanzas of the poem
In More Detail
Type
repetition of phrases
anaphor
alliteration
consonance
assonance
Standard forms
8. Repetition is an important feature of this poem.
a. Find an example of each type of repetition.
Examples
b. What is the effect of the repetition Tick the statements you agree with.
a. It makes the poem more musical.
b. It makes the words easier to remember.
c. It highlights important words and phrases.
d. It makes the poem boring and predictable.
9. Here is a checklist of the main features of the standard form known as the
traditional or folk ballad. Which features can you link to the ballad Lord Ullin’s Daughter
a. The authors of ballads are anonymous (usually minstrels and troubadours) and their
narrators are impersonal.
b. They were handed down orally and changed as they passed from person to person and
from country to country. They were generally not written down until the 18th century.
c. Ballads are meant for performance, with or without musical accompaniment, and so
they contain many sound features, especially repetition, which make them musical
and memorable.
d. A key feature of ballads is their simplicity. The storyline is simple, often tragic, and
focuses on action. There are no descriptive passages. The characters are
straightforward and are not psychologically complex. The language is lexically and
syntactically simple and contains stock phrases or formulae and codes which
audiences immediately recognise.
e. The traditional ballad stanza is a quatrain and usually alternates lines of tetrameter
and trimeter (4-3-4-3 stress pattern). Different rhyme schemes are present but the
most common are abab and abcb.
f. Predominant themes of ballad stories are tragic ones of love, death, revenge,
betrayal, conflict.
Section 3 In More Detail Learning about Poetry (ballad)
Thomas Campbell, Lord Ullin’s Daughter 4