The Battle of Blenheim

The poem consists of modified ballad stanzas. Traditionally, the ballad stanza consists of four lines, a quatrain. Southey adds a rhyming couplet to the quatrain, to create a stanza of six lines rather than four. 

The meter is traditional ballad meter. Thus the first and third lines in each stanza are iambic tetrameters. An iambic foot consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, and a tetrameter consists of four iambic feet. These tetrameters alternate with iambic trimeter (three poetic feet) in the second and fourth lines of each stanza. The first four lines of Stanza 1 therefore scan as follows:

It was a summer evening,

Old Kaspar’s work was done,

And he before his cottage door

Was sitting in the sun (Lines 1-4).

Then follows a rhyming couplet to complete the stanza, which is Southey’s modification of the ballad stanza. The meter is also different, since both lines of the couplet are tetrameters: “And by him sported on the green / His little grandchild Wilhelmine” (Lines 5-6).

An exception to the regularity of the meter can be found in the first two lines of Stanza 4: “I find them in the garden, / For there’s many here about” (Lines 19-20), in which the expected tetrameter (from the first line) is one syllable short and the expected trimeter that follows (in the second line) has one extra syllable, so these lines are of equal length.