THE BALLAD

Ballad is a narrative form of poetry and it has got some fundamental characteristics: it is a form of entertainment, it is about tragic love and supernatural and it is about the fights between the borders of England and Scotland. It was also accompained by music.

LADY DIAMOND

Lady diamond is a typical Scottish ballad: it is organized into thirteen stanzas and it tells about the love between Lady diamond a a servant, the kitchen boy.

There are a lot of rhymes, repetitions, assonances and alliterations, for example the repetition "king-king" in the first quatrain or the alliteration "daughter-dear" in the first quatrain, too.

These devices were fundamental to help memorisation and to make this ballad pleasant to hear.