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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 110
From Ballads to Betjeman
Carl Woodring
Through the centuries English verse in a variety of forms has reached a large audience through broadsides, newspapers, magazines, and vocal performance. Only recently has popular verse received attention in classrooms and academic journals.
Among topics little taught in the classroom, the traditional ballad has been one of the most continuously researched. Although the word
ballad
initially referred to dance, the ballad of tradition is a story set to music, passed orally among the "folk" from generation to generation. Immemorial in origin and transmitted also by writing and printing, ballads were preserved at crucial stages, through singers unable to read, by memory. Francis James Child, for his
English and Scottish Popular Ballads
(18821896), found variants in manuscripts of the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries. A large portion of the most continuously admired ballads appeared with various degrees of polish in Thomas Percy's
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
(1765), which alerted Burns, Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge to the beguiling force of "folk" balladry. Before Child, sophisticated poets learned from balladry much as prominent twentieth-century artists were to learn from African sculpture. Ballads have exceeded every other source in pervasive influence on poetry of the last two centuries; the trail from the
Lyrical Ballads
of Wordsworth and Coleridge is unbroken.
Revered for their simplicity, traditional ballads show more often than tell; in telling, they usually avoid straightforward narrative. Often they convey a crucial detail only implicitly; the listener must be alert enough to supply the linchpin. Protagonist and speaker are often the same. As
 
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in other forms of popular song, refrain is common. In a large class of ballads details emerge by incremental repetition in a dialogue of questions and answers. In "Lord Randal" the son answers his mother's questions with a varied refrain ending, "I fain wad lie down," saying that he met his true love, that she fed him fried eels, that his hawks and hounds died, that he has been poisoned, that he is sick at heart, that he leaves property to his mother, sister, and brother, and finally that he leaves his true love ''hell and fire."
A stanzaic form common enough to be known as the ballad stanza, printed in quatrains as here from "The Wife of Usher's Well," was probably in origin a pair of seven-beat couplets:
Up then crew the red, red cock,
  And up and crew the gray;
The eldest to the youngest said,
  'Tis time we were away.
This ballad in a dozen or so stanzas builds typically upon folklore, superstition, and sacred numbers: the three sons have returned after death. Ballad narratives often end, and sometimes begin, in catastrophe. In "Sir Patrick Spens" the sea captain knows, from the new moon with the old moon in her arm, that the king is sending him into a fatal storm. In "Edward" a son who in differing versions has murdered his brother, his father, or his bride answers his mother's final question by leaving her the "curse of hell" for counseling him to do it. In "Barbara Allen," thought to have passed across seas and into mountain communities with remarkably few variants (before and after Percy included two sophisticated versions in
Reliques
), the balladeer accounts for intertwined briars over two graves in his town by telling of the local girl who spurned sweet William on his deathbed because he had slighted her once in a tavernonly to die soon after from grief over her error. Bertrand Bronson began his fine book
The Ballad as Song
(1969) by calling into question all versions of "Edward" as too sophisticated for the simplicities of tradition. He warned that every ballad unrecorded before Percy, even as sung by unlettered mountaineers, might be contaminated byand possibly have originated inthe Enlightenment. Like Joseph Hendren in 1936, Bronson endeavored to establish the primacy of tune over words.
Balladry saved most of its happy endings for episodes in the career of Robin Hood. Praise for later outlaws in later ballads tends to lament the
 
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offender's sorry end. For
Reliques
, Percy's friend James Grainger gave "Bryan and Pereene, A West-Indian Ballad" an ending as naively grim as he could make itwhen a shark dyes the ocean red with Bryan's blood, Pereene collapses: "Soon her knell they ring." In an exception to the common woe of traditional ballads, the Turkish maiden in "Lord Bateman'' freed the English lord from her father's prison, was promised the lord's half of Northumberland, remained true (one version says for 7 + 7 years = 33), crossed the sea (with her mother), and finally gained the promise of marriage to Lord Bateman in her own land.
Anonymous ballads, carols, songs, rhymed epigrams, and humorous epitaphs have been found in manuscripts and commonplace books of every period.
The Oxford Book of Light Verse
, "chosen" by W. H. Auden, includes an anonymous poem in Middle English with tumbling rhymes and alliteration for comic effect: to the Tournament of Tottenham came all the men of "Hyssylton, of Hygate, and of Hakenay""Of fele feyht-ing folk ferly we fynde." Of later verse the Oxford volume includes madrigals, "The Vicar of Bray," and songs by Thomas Campion and Thomas Moore, light perforce because designed to be heard as songs. Anonymous nursery rhymes, such as "Mary had a little lamb" and "Little Jack Horner," have been made an academic subject almost two-handedly by Iona and Peter Opie.
Broadside ballads, of the kind peddled by Autolycus in
The Winter's Tale
, were typically printed on one side of cheap paper and illustrated with crude woodcutsreused regardless of their irrelevance to successive ballads. Hawked in the streets and at fairs, and ephemeral in popularity, they provided news of shocking events and freaks of nature for the less educated. The collection of such ballads by Samuel Pepys in the seventeenth century was edited by Hyder E. Rollins in eight volumes in 19291932, shortly after serious, unironic hawking of such ballads is thought to have ceased. Pepys divided his collection into ten categories, which include murder, love, cuckoldry, the state and the times, true and fabulous history, and bibulous fellowship. An eighteenth-century publisher in Seven Dials (London), James Catnach, made the gallows and final confessions a speciality. Ballads of the nineteenth-century industrial North uncovered by Martha Vicinus include protest, as in "Collier Lass" ("And our hearts are as white as your lords in fine places"), but Luddite objection pales when the new looms become sexual metaphors for seduction and consent. For most ballad scholars, "traditional" means superior; "broadside" indicates inferiority. Yet Pinto and Rodway, in the
 
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introduction to their anthology
The Common Muse
, could stress the influence of urban, "lowfaluting" ballads on Marvell, Swift, Prior, Gay, Blake, and Hardy. George Barker announced no abrupt change in his style when he entitled his last (posthumous) volume
Street Ballads
. Wordsworth and Coleridge had tried in
Lyrical Ballads
to incorporate the grit and grim humor of broadsides.
Satire in verse has been repeatedly popular. Dependably censorious against immorality and folly, with the unfailing characteristic of exaggeration, satire has enjoyed successive fashions in form. The tumbling verse of "beastly Skelton," recurrent in satire, has spilled into the nurseryas in Robert Southey's verses on the falls of Lodore: "Rising and leaping, / Sinking and creeping, / Swelling and sweeping. . . ." Nearly three centuries of octosyllabic couplets have claimed descent from Samuel Butler's
Hudibras
(16631678): "For Rhime the Rudder is of Verses, / With which like Ships they steer their courses." Polysyllabic rhymes for comic effect bore the name Hudibrastic until they found their master in Byron: "Juan''"new one"; "Pompilius""born bil-ious"; "business""dizziness"; "pillar! He""artillery"; "intellectual""hen-peck'd you all."
Miscellanies published as
Poems on Affairs of State
during the last decade of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the next (and fully annotated in seven volumes by George deF. Lord et al. at Yale, 19631975), gathered major, minor, and anonymous poets, noblemen and hacks. One so gathered, belonging to almost all these categories, was John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester, a satirist of unalloyed wit but regarded for two centuries as debased by sexuality explicit and metaphorical, as in a debauchee's regret that age would force him "from the pleasing billows of debauch / On the dull shore of lazy temperance." Centuries that ignored the skill of Rochester's love lyrics remembered his "Impromptu" on Charles II, "Who never said a foolish thing, / Nor ever did a wise one."
Jonathan Swift, who practiced Hudibrastic rhyme in Butlerian couplets, could imitate if not rival his friend Popeas in "A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General," celebrating the demise of the Duke of Marlborough: "Turn'd to that dirt from whence he sprung." It is satire that charges the duke with vice by replacing the expected "earth" with "dirt." In addition to exercising his delight in the language of servants, Swift derided romantic attempts to spiritualize female beauty, as in "Phyllis; or, The Progress of Love":
 
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Or on the Mat devoutly kneeling
Would lift her Eyes up to the Ceiling,
And heave her Bosom unaware
For neighb'ring Beaux to see it bare.
In the literary circle of Pope and Swift satire could fade almost imperceptibly into lightly comic verse. William Walsh, mildly antiromantic, exposed in dimeter lines a rejected lover about to kill himself until he reflects that a new love is easier to come by than a new neck. John Gay, best known for depicting Prime Minister Walpole as a highwayman in
The Beggar's Opera
(adapted by Bertolt Brecht into
Der Dreigroschenoper
) and for his own epitaph in Westminster Abbey"Life is a jest, and all things show it; / I thought so once and now I know it"fused his talents for burlesque and the observation of low life in
Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London
. There he made an occupational survey of the topography, with advice to gentlemen on dressing defensively and yielding the wall to maidens, laden porters, and the powdered fop, but never to bullies. Gay's success led a century of poets to scan London streets. Mary "Perdita" Robinson, who belongs more decisively to the history of royal misconduct than to that of poetry, was to make observations in verse, similar to Gay's, from her condition as a lamed woman of fashion. (Judith Pascoe gives details in the
Wordsworth Circle
, Summer 1992.) Rejection of London rakes and grime found its corollary in "The Deserted Village,'' where Goldsmith complained, like Hardy a century later, of desolation imposed by urban wealth and London ways.
Versifiers and publishers saw new possibilities in fables for illustrated volumes of satiric or comic verse. Gay's
Fables
, not memorable or distinctive in language, provided intellectual diversion through moralized tales of animals always above or below the human norm and usually intelligent enough to avoid coxcombs, college, and court. And the several editions provided work for the engraver.
Matthew Prior, who joined Swift's Tory party and was in consequence imprisoned for his successes as a diplomat and spy, could be coarser in jest than Swift, but he refined the love poetry of the Cavaliers into the elegance and decorum of
vers de société
. The understatement and tenderness to be perfected by Walter Savage Landor appear in a quatrain of Prior's poem "To a Child of Quality":
For, as our different ages move,
'Tis so ordain'd (would Fate but mend it),

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