My Ballad - You say no.

ballad - does that mean it is musical? will we see a song to match this soon? (:

lovely to see people getting familiar with the classic styles again. a lot of young folk think these are out of date but really there is not much new in the world and ithink there is nothing as endearing or fresh as well-written classic stuff. sounds like you have a lot of emotion to be poured out here, it is great that you are turning what must be unhappiness into optimism and using it to motivate yourself

my first instinct was analysing the meter, then realising that maybe that is not the sort of comment you want. i know that meter is always hard, especially after saying it to yourself by the end of writing the poem! just providing a fresh ear to listen to your syllables.

but yes, please ignore the spoiler if it is not appropriate or what you were expecting. hope to see more of your work!

 Spoiler

have syllabified and analysed the heavy and light syllables for you so you can see what it looks like. NB: an iamb looks like ti-tum, or light-heavy, which in English is the same as short-long. this line is a bit awkward because you have to make the word "A" heavy to avoid putting two light syllables in a row, which iambic doesn't permit. in these 3 cases it is unlikely the reader will make one of the two short syllables heavy, so they will just say them quickly together - this makes the foot an anapest (light-light-heavy), not an iamb. iambic lines cannot start with a heavy syllable (light-heavy only) - i see this a lot of times (see previous examples). so yes, i do not think you are writing in pure iambs. you are probably using a particular meter that begins with one kind of foot and ends with another. this is not bad though!

(for example classic greek "dactylic hexameter": the first four feet are dactyls or spondees, the fifth a dactyl and the sixth a dactyl or trochee! certainly doesn't only use dactyls - but it is very strict on what it does permit. sorry about geekiness - just trying to show that even if meters are called iambic/dactylic/trochaic etc, they do have variability, even if they do it in very specific ways.)

might be interesting to explore this more - maybe you are using this kind of meter in other poems too.

I've never written a ballad in my life, so theres room for plenty of errors. This wasn't for a poetry class, just a simple english class where Iambic meter doesn't really effect the grade too drastically.