Folk-poetry is conventional; it seems to be the production of a guild, and to have certain well understood and commonly expected tricks of style and verse.  Freshness and sincerity are almost always attributes of the poetry of heroic ages, but individuality belongs to a high civilization and an advanced literary culture.  Whether the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” are the work of one poet or of a cycle of poets, doubtless the rhetorical peculiarities of the Homeric epics, such as the recurrent phrase and the conventional epithet (the rosy-fingered dawn, the well-greaved Greeks, the swift-footed Achilles, the much-enduring Odysseus, etc.) are due to this communal or associative character of ancient heroic song.  As in the companies of architects who built the mediaeval cathedrals, or in the schools of early Italian painters, masters and disciples, the manner of the individual artist was subdued to the tradition of his craft.

The English and Scottish popular ballads are in various simple stanza forms, the commonest of all being the old septenarius or “fourteener,” arranged in a four-lined stanza of alternate eights and sixes, thus: 

    “Up then crew the red, red cock,
      And up and crew the gray;
    The eldest to the youngest said
      ‘’Tis time we were away.’"[4]

This is the stanza usually employed by modern ballad imitators, like Coleridge in “The Ancient Mariner,” Scott in “Jock o’ Hazeldean,” Longfellow in “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” Macaulay in the “Lays of Ancient Rome,” Aytoun in the “Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers.”  Many of the stylistic and metrical peculiarities of the ballads arose from the fact that they were made to be sung or recited from memory.  Such are perhaps the division of the longer ones into fits, to rest the voice of the singer; and the use of the burden or refrain for the same purpose, as also to give the listeners and bystanders a chance to take up the chorus, which they probably accompanied with a few dancing steps.[5] Sometimes the burden has no meaning in itself and serves only to mark time with a Hey derry down or an O lilly lally and the like.  Sometimes it has more or less reference to the story, as in “The Two Sisters”: 

    “He has ta’en three locks o’ her yellow hair—­
      Binnorie, O Binnorie—­
    And wi’ them strung his harp sae rare—­
      By the bonnie mill-dams of Binnorie.”

Again it has no discoverable relation to the context, as in “Riddles Wisely Expounded”—­

    “There was a knicht riding frae the east—­
      Jennifer gentle and rosemarie—­
    Who had been wooing at monie a place—­
      As the dew flies over the mulberry tree.”

Both kinds of refrain have been liberally employed by modern balladists.  Thus Tennyson in “The Sisters”: 

    “We were two sisters of one race,
      The wind is howling in turret and tree;
_ She was the fairer in the face,
      O the earl was fair to see."_