A Ballad's Ballad
"Strange fits of passion" was published in 1802, in the second edition of Wordsworth's groundbreaking book Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth co-wrote it with his best buddy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and together they essentially launched British Romanticism.
You can check out "In a Nutshell" for more, but for now we'll just let you know that Lyrical Ballads was more than just a clever title. The full title, in fact, was Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, indicating that a majority of the contents were actually ballads, along with some other, non-ballad poems.
Sure enough, a quick glance at the form of "Strange fits of passion" tells us that we have a bonafide ballad on our hands. That means quatrains, with alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, and a regular rhyme scheme. Now don't worry if all those poetry terms have set your head spinning. We're here to break it all down for you.
Let's start with the poem's rhythm. Every line is iambic, meaning that they contain a repeating pattern of iambs. An iamb is a two-syllable pair in which the first syllable is unstressed, and the second one is stressed. The effect sounds like "daDUM."
In the odd-numbered lines of "Strange Fits," we hear four iambs. Check it out:
But in the Lover's ear alone, (3)
If you read that out loud, you should hear a pattern of iambs: daDUM, daDUM, daDUM, daDUM. You can do the same for line 5, 7, 9—really any of the first or third lines in any of the poem's seven stanzas. These lines all have four iambs, or a meter of iambic tetrameter (tetra- means four).
The even-numbered lines are a different story—slightly different anyway. Check out line 4:
What once to me befell. (4)
What you get in the even-numbered lines is iambic trimeter, or three iambs (tri- meaning three): daDUM, daDUM, daDUM. Check line 6, 8, 10—the pattern holds up. In fact, the regularity of the poem's rhythm is matched only by the consistency of its rhyme:
When she I loved looked every day A
Fresh as a rose in June, B
I to her cottage bent my way, A
Beneath an evening-moon. B (5-8)
That same rhyme scheme (ABAB) holds up for every stanza. What we have here, by any measure, is a classic ballad form.
Great—so what's the big deal about a ballad anyway? Why did Wordsworth go with this form for "Strange fits of passion"? One reason, we think, is because of the way the meter of the poem subtly puts us in mind of a horse clopping towards its destination. As the speaker's horse carries him closer to Lucy's cottage, we can almost hear the clip-clop of hooves: daDUM, daDUM, daDUM, daDUM.
Another reason for the ballad form, though, is because Wordsworth was a poet for the people. He was against all the elevated language and obscure references of the poetry of his day, so he went for more popular forms (like the ballad) and more direct language in order to appeal to a broader audience. So don't believe it when the speaker says that he just wants to tell his tale "in the Lover's ear alone" (3). Wordsworth really wanted his poems to reach far and wide.