Hello, 🌖 HuntersMoon

Yes, when I saw that Community Challenge in the newsfeed, I suspected it might cause me some trouble!

What I liked

I love ballad metre, so it's great to see you put it into action here. You use a rather clever feminine ending to your rhyming lines in the second quatrain.

Your theme is wonderful. You've chosen a very interesting topic from Nordic mythology to inspire your piece.

What might need work

Let's look at this stanza as an example from your poem:

The small arrow that he carried
he claimed would guide the way
to the halls of great Valhalla
and its ice covered quay.

This may be a British English thing, but to me "way" doesn't rhyme with "quay" because it's pronounced like "key". Perhaps you say it differently. I've checked it on Rhymezone, and interestingly they list both "key" and "way" as rhymes suggesting two alternative pronounciations:

http://www.rhymezone.com/r/rhyme.cgi?Word=Quay+&typeofrhyme=perfect&org1=syl&org...

Other than this tiny, British English quibble and non-issue, the rhymes are great.

In your notes you mention that ballad metre is traditionally rendered in alternating lines of iambic trimeter and tetrameter. I feel that if you believe these lines are written in iambic metre then you may need to revise your understanding of iambic foot.

To express it simply, an iamb is two syllables where the first is unstressed and the second stressed. Iambic tetrameter, as an example, would produce a series of syllables that sounded like "and one, and two, and three, and four", like a dance teacher calling out the pace and stressing the numbers for when the dancer moves.

So, when writing iambic feet, it's important to know which syllables are stressed. Take the word arrow. In your first line here, you've placed it where "a" should be unstressed and "row" stressed. However, if you check on the website "How Many Syllables" you'll find that it's the opposite way around, with "a" stressed and "row" unstressed:

https://www.howmanysyllables.com/words/arrow

And again, at the end of the line there's the word "carried" in a position where "car" should be unstressed and "ried" stressed, but check the root word "carry" on"How Many Syllables" and you'll find that "car" is stressed while "ry" is unstressed:

https://www.howmanysyllables.com/words/carry

Articles, prepositions and pronouns are usually unstressed, though they may become stressed by position if the other syllables beside them are unstressed.

Focusing on the last two lines of this example quatrain, note that your stress patterns are:

to the halls of great Valhalla
and its ice covered quay.

https://www.howmanysyllables.com/words/valhalla

It seems you have the correct syllable count for a line of tetrameter followed by a line of trimeter, but the stress patterns do not follow that of iambic metre. In fact, the first of these two lines is a perfect example of trochaic tetrameter, a series of four trochees in a row, metric feet where the first syllable is stressed and the second unstressed: "one and two and three and four and."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trochaic_tetrameter

Of course, you could simply rectify this problem by removing the statement that this poem is written in ballad metre. The rhyme and structure is generally fine if it doesn't need to follow metre.


Hope my waffling helps you in some small way.

Thank you for sharing!

Best wishes,

Bob



My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .