Ballade of Wordly Wealth Essay

The poem Ballade of Wordly Wealth by Andrew Lang describes the truth about money. People will do anything for money and can easily corrupt our society. The main speaker is the author, Andrew Lang speaking to many different people in the poem. Merchants, soldiers, captains, priests and so on.

That is who is in his time frame between 1844 and 1912. This poem is a form of Haiku, a Japanese poetry that contains 5 syllables in the first line, and 7 syllables in the second line and 5 syllables in the third line. It’s more Haiku than sonnet or sestina. Three stanzas each are containing eight lines that rhyme.That makes it much easier to understand the poem.

Especially if you read it out loud. There are also many Rhetoric patterns as well. For example, “taketh”, “maketh”, “to throw”, “can strow”, “without a bow”, and “ebb and flow”. These all rhyme to fit this poem. Wordly Wealth has a lot of the same endings with “th” like, Taketh, maketh, truth, youth, health, and gaineth. That is the pattern of sounds. It’s very easy to understand that his words end in a rhyme. The structure of this poem is how people use money and how they see it.

Andrew Lang Describes how money can corrupt people’s lives and ruin it.It’s all on how you look at it. Lang uses repetition to explain his ideas. He believes money can be good or it can be evil.

The word money is repeated throughout the whole poem because it’s the theme. Idea or clause that is presented with an opposing idea, that money creates greed and or have people see money has a good thing when in actuality it a lie. The repeated phrases are “youth, health and paradise.

Why is that? Is it because if we have our youth and our health we will have our paradise? Does money really matter, or does it create more problems that always lead up to more?