This poem is essentially a song lyric by a Jamaican-born poet and performer, and I have mixed feelings about including it in the anthology because, as with Bob Dylan’s lyrics, texts that work as lyrics do not quite work when read as text on a page. The song is written in strong Jamaican patois from the point of view of a black man who has worked in a variety of jobs, who feels stiffed by the tax system and by the fact that he was laid off at the age of fifty-five. Here’s the recording, it’s much more interesting to listen to than to read.
ballad
W. H. Auden – “As I walked out one evening”
The poem, in contrast to “Spain”, has a rhythmic quality of nursery rhymes to which it alludes through its rhymes (sometimes imperfect) and its accentual verse. The speaker “walked out one evening” through Bristol Street, among the crowds which seemed to him like “harvest wheat”, an important image of mortality. He heard a lover sing under an archway of the railway bridge, making extravagant and hyperbolic promises of eternal love: “till China and Africa meet… till the ocean/is folded and hanged up to dry” etc. All the clocks in the city answer to it with an ironic reply reminding the lover that time conquers all. It watches the lovers from the shadows and coughs when they want to kiss, like a chaperone reminding about her presence. Our life is wasted in “headaches and in worry”, and death ends our dances. The following images bring to mind these moments when we feel our transience in our everyday lives: when you wash your hands and stare at them, wondering what you missed, when a crack appears in a teacup and it seems like a lane “to the land of the dead”. Our childhood innocence becomes corrupt as we age, which is illustrated by the images of nursery rhyme and fairy tale characters, like Jack who is now enchanted by the murderous Giant. In a way reminiscent of popular ballads, the poem exhorts the listener to look in the mirror or stand in the window and accept the pain of existence: “life remains a blessing/Although you cannot bless”. We live in a fallen world, where “you shall love your crooked neighbour/with your crooked heart”. The poem ends with a characteristic ballad coda – it was late in the evening, the lovers were gone, and the river ran on, like an image of time.
Thomas Hardy – “A Trampwoman’s Tragedy”
In this longer narrative poem Hardy moves beyond his native Dorset a little bit to the north, to Somerset. The poem is said to be loosely based on an actual criminal case Hardy heard about from his mother, which took place in the 1820s, as the subtitle of the poem indicates (although if you read the linked article, the only thing Hardy’s poem has in common with the story is that it’s the story of a fatal stabbing, committed in an inn and motivated by jealousy. OK, so that’s three things.) The poem is written from the viewpoint of the titular trampwoman, in a stanza which somewhat recalls the rhythms of a song, with the second line echoing the first one. The woman describes her travelling on foot through various places in Somerset in a group of four, which included her lover, an older woman she calls “Mother Lee” and a man she calls “jeering John”. Hardy meticulously lists all the placenames which he knew from his bike rides, and he adds an amusing anecdote in the footnote about how when he reached Windwhistle Inn on a hot summer day, he was told by the landlady that he could get tea only if he himself fetched water from a valley half a mile away; the bar contained plenty of “full barrels” though. As they are climbing to the top of Polden Hills (called here “Poldon”), she starts flirting with John for reasons she never explains – maybe just to tease her lover. Finally they see the long awaited Marshal’s Elm, one of the lonely inns she and her lover favoured. (Like other places mentioned here, Marshal’s Elm was a real one too, although as Hardy notes, at the time of his writing the poem it had already been closed.) When they sit down to have a drink there, the speaker intensifies her flirting with John, who says jokingly that she is now going to be his partner, and her former lover can take Mother Lee (presumably many years his senior). Her lover then asks her in a strange voice she has never heard before about whether John is the father of the child she is carrying, and she still teasing him nods her assent, even though it’s not true. Her lover stabs John to death and it happens so quickly John is dead before the women realize what has happened. Then he is sentenced to death and hanged in Ilchester, which Hardy calls it by its alternative name Ivel-chester, perhaps to emphasize the evilness of the place. It’s the first bad thing he’s done in his life, the speaker asserts mournfully, not counting the one horse he stole, and it was “in time o’need”, unlike the legendary Wessex horse stealer Blue Jimmy. On the day of his death the speaker gives birth to a dead child, alone under a tree, with nobody to take care of her, since Mother Lee has died as well. But at night, as she is laying under the tree, the ghost of her lover appears to her and asks her once again whose child it was, so that he may find rest. She then tells him the truth, that it that she’s been faithful to him ever from the moment they kissed and vowed to be together. The ghost smiles and disappears, while the speaker is left alone “haunting the Western Moor” – it is uncertain whether she is alive or a ghost as well at that moment.
Anonymous – “Poverty Knock”
Up to this point I’ve read the accounts of the lives of the poor working class written by the men who, even with the best of intentions, were outsiders looking in. This anonymous ballad is the voice of the working class, and although it’s dating is perhaps a bit vague (it was recorded by a folklorist in 1965 who heard it from an old weaver who claimed he had heard it sixty years earlier) it sounds authentic. The “poverty knock” of the refrain is the incessant knocking of the loom. The stanzas of the ballad describe the usual travails of working life: having to get up at five on a cold morning, the foreman (“gaffer”) constantly cheating and/or delaying their wages, having to wet their own yarn in a dirty tarn, the aching head and back. There is also the constant danger of industrial accidents, when a loom flies out and hits somebody on the head, but everybody is too busy working to help her. The tuner (the man who repairs the loom) is too busy flirting with another worker, Lizzie, to do his job, and Lizzie’s clothes are clearly getting too tight for her, i.e. she might be pregnant. Here’s a rendition of this ballad:
Anna Letitia Barbauld – “The Mouse’s Petition”
After spending a few days reading the introduction to the Romanticism section, I recommence my blogging with a poem by Anna Letitia Barbauld which is both rather chaNrming and poignant. In a previous life, I researched historical children’s literature and read a bunch of old (by “old” I mean from the 1970s at the latest) historical reviews of children’s literature, in which “Mrs Barbauld” was usually cast as a schoolmarmish boring type, contrasted with the fantasy and romantic spirit brought about by later eras; everyone invariably quoted Charles Lamb fulminating in a letter to his mate Coleridge about how “Goody Two-Shoes [an 18-th c. text considered to be the first original novel for children in English, attributed sometimes to Oliver Goldsmith] is almost out of print” and blaming it on the prevalence of heavily didactic texts by Barbauld and Sarah Trimmer. Lamb was not quite right: neither Barbauld was a talentless didactic monster, nor Goody Two-Shoes was the whimsical masterpiece he seemed to have remembered – it’s in fact quite heavily moralistic. I guess what happened to Lamb was just what happens to many of us: we remember nostalgically a book we loved as children and we do not have an opportunity to verify our love for it until the time comes to read it to our own children in turn. Anyway, Barbauld does not deserve the bad rap she got and the editors of the NAEL in their praiseworthy efforts to extend the discussion of Romantic poetry beyond the Big Six (Blake, Wordsworth Coleridge, Byron, Percy Shelley, Keats) include her and several other women writers.
Barbauld had the good luck of being a daughter of a Dissenting minister who was a teacher at the Warburton Academy in Lancashire, a leading school among many dissenting academies, or educational institutions founded by Nonconformists whose religion prevented them from being admitted to Oxbridge. TBH, the Oxbridge authorities did them a service, because while Oxbridge in the 18th c. still focused on teaching classics, dissenting academies taught modern languages and natural science, and one of the teachers at Warburton was none other than Joseph Priestley. Priestley experimented then with isolating carbon dioxide and observing its effects by using it to put down the mice caught in the traps. One such unhappy mouse was found too late in the evening and Priestley left her for the whole night in the cage, but next day, when the cage with the prisoner was brought to him, he found the poem written by Mrs Barbauld (then still Miss Aiken) twisted around its wires and was apparently moved enough to pardon the mouse.
The poem is written in the voice of the mouse, using the traditional ballad stanza (alternating 8 and 6-syllable lines, rhythm pattern a b c b). The mouse begs Priestley for his freedom, appealing to his political views which apparently already at that time were known to Aiken (later Priestley supported both the American and the French Revolution). So the mouse calls itself “free-born” and asks Priestley not to be a bloody tyrant. It can feed on the remnants of people’s meals, but if they are mean enough to deny it even that, then air and light are gifts of nature freely given to all. Alluding to the fact that Priestley apparently at that time believed in reincarnation, it warns Priestley than in killing a mouse he can kill his fellow human. And if this life is everything that animals have, it is even more cruel to deprive them of it. The poem ends with the promise of a blessing if Priestley lets the mouse go free and the hope that if one day, like the mouse, he is also in danger of falling into some kind of metaphorical trap, a kind angel may succour him. The poem is both funny and touching. The combination of human emotion and cold science reminded me of this famous painting by Joseph Wright of Derby.
“The Bonny Earl of Murray”
Now this is a ballad inspired by real historical events, unlike the other vague speculations about what could be the real story behind “Sir Patrick Spens”. James Earl of Murray was engaged in a long feud with Earl of Huntly and King James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) chose Huntly, of all people, to bring him to his trial when Murray was suspected of plotting against the king. This unsurprisingly ended with a debacle and Murray was killed as a result, not yet 30. The ballad is a lament for the dead young earl, whom “they have slain.. and laid him on the green” (hence the term “mondegreen“) The second stanza is supposedly the chiding Huntly received from the king, saying that he just ordered Huntly to bring him, not to kill him. Huntly did get off suspiciously easily, and then immediately got into his own plotting, reading about which made me very tired. James VI & I doesn’t have particularly good press, but the fact that he survived and died natural death makes me grudgingly admire him. The following stanzas list all the achievements of Murray: riding at the ring (meaning the ring impaled on the knights’ spears during the tournaments), being the handsomest nobleman and supposedly the queen’s love (no proof of that). Also the last stanza, imagining his lady looking out for him in vain from the Castle Doune is not correct, since Murray’s young wife died just a few months before him.
“The Three Ravens”, “Sir Patrick Spens”
“The Three Ravens” is another story about death, told from the viewpoint of the three ravens who are wondering where they could find something to eat. One of them mentions the body of a slain knight, but in fact this knight would not make a good meal, because he is closely guarded by his hounds and his hawks. Then a pregnant doe comes to him, and she is a metaphor for his lover or wife: she kisses his wounds, takes him on her back, carries him to his grave and buries him. And then she dies herself. The ballad ends with the wish that all of us could have such hawks, such hounds, and such a lover.
The famous “Sir Patrick Spens” has so little plot that I can deal with it very briefly: the king of Scotland asks who is the best sailor, a knight recommends Sir Patrick Spens, and then the king sends Sir Patrick on what is apparently a suicide mission, since Sir Patrick knows very well that sailing in winter is dangerous, while the king apparently doesn’t know that, so in the end Sir Patrick and all his companions drown. What is interesting is the sense of doom the ballad builds: Sir Patrick laughs and cries when he reads the letter from the king, then he immediately orders his men to get on board, while the nameless sailor warns him he saw bad omens. There is also a kind of Schadenfreude, as the ballad describes how the Scottish lords didn’t like to wet their cork heels, but soon their hats were bobbing on the waves, and their ladies in their finery are going to wait in vain for them, because Sir Patrick Spens now lies “fifty fadom deep” in the sea with all the Scottish lords at his feet.
“Bonny Barbara Allan”, “The Wife of Usher’s Well”
“Bonny Barbara Allan” is quite a mysterious song. Around Martinmas (November 11) Sir John Graeme falls in love with Barbara Allan and apparently dies because of his love for her. Barbara comes to see him on his deathbed, but she reminds him about a time when he drank in a tavern and forgot to drank her health. Then he turns his face towards the wall, Barbara gets up and leaves slowly. She has not gone a mile or two when she hears the death bells ringing and she hears in their sound “Woe to Barbara Allan”. Then she asks her mother to make her bed for her because she is going to die tomorrow, too. I had to read the Wikipedia entry (I know) to realize that John Graeme asks Barbara to love him back and she refuses because of the slight. Previously I thought she literally killed him for overlooking her, like the poisonous beloved of Lord Randall:
“The Wife of Usher’s Well” is a more straightforward story about the return from the dead. The sons of a wealthy widow of the title go to sea and just after a week she gets the bad news they are dead. She makes the wish that the wind should never cease until her sons return to her “in flesh and blood”. Indeed, on Martinmas (again) the sons return, wearing the hats made of birk from the trees of Paradise. The happy mother orders her maid to heat the water for the guests and makes them a bed. They lie down together in one bed, with their mother sitting at their bedside. When the first cock crows, the eldest says to the youngest it’s time they went, and the youngest echoes it back, in the typical ballad repetition. The sons say ominously that if they are missing at dawn they must suffer. They say their goodbyes to the mother, the farm, and the maid. And then the story ends. Both ballads are written in the typical ballad stanza, alternating 4-beat and 3-beat lines, with thymes abcb.
“Lord Randall”
Today I’m starting the section with popular ballads, which became an object of academic interest since Bishop Percy published his collection in 1765. The first one is “Lord Randall”, which like many ballads has the form of a conversation between the title character and his mother. She asks him where he’s been, he says he’s been hunting and asks her, like he is going to in every stanza, to make his bed for him because he’s tired and wants to lie down. She asks him where he had his dinner, and he tells her he ate with his true love. She asks him what he’s had and he says eels boiled in broth. She then asks suspiciously what happened to his bloodhounds, and he says they swelled and died (you’d thought bloodhounds would be more easily alerted by any funny smell). She then says she is afraid he’s been poisoned, and he confirms that, finally saying that he wants her to make his bed because he’s “sick at the heart”.
Ballads, like folk tales, come in many different versions, and I couldn’t find exactly the one reprinted in the NAEL (from Child’s magisterial collection), so I picked this one, just because I like Harry Belafonte, and also because it is close to this text (the text in the NAEL does not include the last two stanzas).
Reading The Norton Anthology of English Literature 