Folklore
Borrow the old stories, the ballads, charms and warnings, and make them tell new truths.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about folklore: ballads, retellings and folk symbols, with craft techniques, exercises and prompts in this free Writory guide for poets.
What this theme is
Folklore is the story-stock a culture owns in common: ballads nobody wrote, warnings about the woods, charms against toothache, tales of selkies, tricksters and bargains that go wrong. When poets work with folklore they are handling material the reader already half-knows, and that is the theme's great power. You do not have to build the haunted forest; it is already standing in the reader's mind, complete with its rules. Your job is to walk into it from an unexpected direction.
A folklore poem can retell a tale, continue it past its ending, or hand the microphone to a character the original silenced. Keats did the first kind in 'La Belle Dame sans Merci', pouring folk ballad machinery, the pale knight, the faery woman, the fatal enchantment, into literary form. The best modern folklore poems tend toward the third kind, asking what the story looks like from inside the gingerbread house or under the bridge.
Why poets return to it
Shared symbols do enormous lifting for free: say 'crossroads at midnight' and centuries of dread arrive unpaid. Folklore also gives poets a respectable disguise for dangerous material, since a tale about a wolf can say things about predators that a memoir cannot. And because a retelling displays both inherited theme and personal invention side by side, it is a natural fit for contests like Writory's, where creativity and theme are scored separately and a fresh angle on an old tale shines in both columns.
Where it comes from
The border ballads of Scotland and England, 'Tam Lin', 'The Twa Corbies' and their kin, passed mouth to mouth for centuries before anyone wrote them down, carrying abduction, murder and faery bargains in four-line stanzas. Robert Burns collected and remade Scots folk material, and his 'Tam o' Shanter' turned a drunk man's ride past a haunted kirk into comic legend. The Romantics raided the same cupboard: Keats's ballad of the merciless lady, Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market' with its forbidden fruit and sisterly rescue, and later Yeats, who mined Irish fairy lore for 'The Stolen Child' and much else.
The twentieth century learned to talk back to the tales. Anne Sexton's Transformations retold the Grimm stories with surgical, unsettling wit, and Carol Ann Duffy gave long-overdue voices to the wives and women standing at the edges of legend. The lesson from all of them: folklore is not a museum, it is a quarry.
The elements that carry it
- Woods, crossroads, rivers and hedgerows at dusk, the borderlands where folk tales insist the rules change.
- The rule of three: three tasks, three warnings, three knocks at the door, a rhythm readers feel in their bones.
- Ordinary objects with prohibitions attached, do not eat the fruit, do not look back, do not open the smallest door.
- Ballad furniture: question-and-answer exchanges, refrains, and the leaping narrative that skips everything inessential.
- Threshold creatures, selkies, changelings, tricksters, wolves who talk, that stand for whatever refuses to stay in its category.
Techniques that work
- Retell a known tale from a minor or silenced viewpoint: the miller's daughter, the wolf's mother, the youngest goat. The gap between known plot and new voice is where the poem lives.
- Try the ballad stanza, quatrains alternating four beats and three, to give a modern story an ancient gait; the form itself smells of firesides.
- Keep the tale's rules but move its setting to now: the bargain struck in a payday-loan shop, the enchanted sleep in a hospital ward.
- Let the moral stay unspoken. Folk tales end on event, not commentary, and your poem should trust the reader the same way.
- Plant a refrain that returns three or four times and make it mean something slightly more sinister at each return.
Mistakes to avoid
- Retelling without reinterpreting, a faithful summary in line breaks. Fix: change the viewpoint, the era or the ending, or do not bother retelling.
- Fake-archaic diction, ''twas', 'o'er', 'maiden fair'. The old ballads were written in the plain speech of their day; write in yours.
- Over-explaining the legend for readers, which drains the mystery. Give enough to orient, then let strangeness be strange.
- Using folk figures as costume-box decoration while stripping their danger. A witch, a wolf or a river spirit with no teeth is just wallpaper.
An exercise
Take a tale you heard as a child, from any tradition, and write down its three non-negotiable rules (what must not be done, what always happens). Now write a poem set in your own town this year that obeys all three rules without naming the original tale.
A challenge
Write a ballad of at least six quatrains about a piece of purely local folklore: the pond kids are warned about, the house nobody buys, the road accident that grew a legend. Interview one older neighbour or relative first if you can.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem in which a character from folklore fills in an official form: a selkie at passport control, a changeling registering for school, a witch applying for planning permission. Let the bureaucracy reveal the magic.
Before you submit
- The poem assumes an intelligent reader and never summarises the whole legend.
- At least one inherited element (rule of three, prohibition, refrain) is doing structural work.
- The viewpoint, setting or ending differs meaningfully from the source tale.
- No mock-archaic diction survives the final draft.
- The strangeness remains unexplained somewhere: one image is left glowing in the dark.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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