"And Shadow Hem in the Leavès Green"

Air, When Shaws been Sheen

III

"Robin was Reachless on a Root"

"Nor One Behind did Stay"

133

136 138

"He Hent up Robin on His Back'

Air, The Old Chisholm Trail

Air, Whoopee ti yi yo, git Along, Little Dogies.
Portrait, Sir Walter Scott

INTRODUCTION

A BALLAD is a song that tells a story. Of the ballads in this book, some have been handed down by oral tradition, some are the productions of known poets. The traditional ballads belong to popular or folk poetry, the others to the poetry of art.

Traditional poetry differs greatly from artistic poetry. People of to-day who read such poetry for the first time, are apt to feel that it is inferior and even without merit. But when they know it better, they realize that it is in some ways more beautiful and interesting than the polished work of literary artists. This is a discovery that students need to make for themselves. It is to help them make it that this little book is presented to them.

The best way is to read ballads, to read them aloud, over and over again, to learn them by heart, if possible to sing them.* But it may help the student somewhat if he knows beforehand some of the peculiar features of popular ballads.

.. The whole ballad is the thing. One would . . . bid the seeker after excellent differences of the ballads to read Child Waters, Babylon, Lord Randal, Spens, Glasgerion, The Wife of Usher's Well; to read Johnie Cock, Robin Hood and the Monk, Jock o' the Side, the Cheviot; and to sing out loud and bold whatever else commends itself, like the lilt of St. Stephen or the crooning air of the Queen of Elfan's Nourice. One must live one's way into balladry, must learn to love it as a whole and not by elegant extracts.-GUMMERE.

The beauty of the ballad is uncertain and often corrupted by forgetfulness and the ordinary accidents of oral tradition. It is not always true that the right subject has the right form. But the grace of the ballads is unmis

I

WHAT POPULAR BALLADS ARE LIKE

The characteristics here discussed can best be studied in the first dozen or so ballads on our list. We shall call these and similar ballads typical or more primitive.

Refrain. The word ballad, which is only another form of the word ballet, means dance-song. Of the dance we shall say nothing at present. Our ballads do not suggest unmistakably any connection with dancing. They do, however, suggest singing, particularly in the refrain. A refrain is entirely in place in a song and entirely out of place in a poem to be read or recited. When ballads cease to be sung, they slough off their refrain, or change it into something more suitable to reading and recitation.

Sometimes the refrain is hummed or, as in No. 278 of Child's collection, whistled. If this humming becomes articulate, it takes the form of meaningless syllables and words, as in Hind Horn and The Three Ravens. A further advance is seen in such phrases as furnish the refrain of The Cruel Brother and The Twa Sisters. Such a phrase may be made to carry a suggestion: the scene of action, the nature background, the keynote of the story. Thus "Binnorie" may originally have been mere articulate takable; it is unlike anything in the contemporary romances, because it is lyrical poetry. It is often vague and intangible. It is never the same as narrative romance.

"He's tane three locks o' her yellow hair,

Binnorie, O Binnorie!

And wi' them strung his harp so fair

By the bonny mill-dams o' Binnorie."

It is the singing voice that makes the difference; and it is a difference of thon dhe as well as style.-KER.

humming, a series of musically liquid syllables; but "By the bonnie mills dams of Binnorie," in several versions of The Twa Sisters, reiterates in a highly suggestive way the place name connected with the story. "Edward, Edward" and "Mither, Mither" constitute the refrain of Edward, but they also reveal to us the tenseness of the dramatic situation.

Finally we have numerous ballads in which the second and fourth lines of many stanzas have a meaning so feeble that they can be omitted: they are more than refrain, but less than verses. Such lines show how the four-line stanza developed out of the two-line stanza. In The Douglas Tragedy, e. g., the second and fourth lines would scarcely be missed in stanzas 4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, and perhaps two or three others. In Proud Lady Margaret and Sweet William's Ghost about a third of the stanzas are of this type; in The Wife of Usher's Well and Sir Patrick Spens about half.

The chorus is a refrain that comes wholly after each stanza. A burden or undersong is sung as an accompaniment to each stanza.

Not strictly a refrain, but serving the same musical purpose, is the repetition of lines, as in our version of The Twa Sisters, in Edward, and in The Three Ravens. This, like the refrain, may vary from a mere device for supplying words for the air, as in The Three Ravens, up to emphasizing the whole intent and purpose of the stanza, as in Edward.

"Of the 305 ballads in Child's collection, 106 show in some version evidence of chorus or refrain. Of some 1250 versions in all, about 300 have a refrain; but among the old ballads in couplets, out of 31 only 7 lack the refrain as they stand, and even these show traces of it."--Gummere, The Popular Ballad.