Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Part One

Why don’t I remember the words of my own poems and songs whereas I still remember ballads which I haven’t heard or sung for many years? Why do these old songs move me to tears in a way no contemporary poem, mine or anyone else’s, ever does?

When the great folklorist, collector and singer, A.L. Lloyd spoke of ‘the big ballads’ he meant the finest of those anonymous ‘narrative songs of substantial length and strong story line’ historically placed somewhere between the ancient epic and the journalistic ballads which began to be created with the invention of printing.

The origins of ballads are mysterious. Nobody knows for certain where and how they came about. The word ‘ballad’ is thought to derive from a word meaning ‘dance’ (from the French ‘ballares’) and the ‘ballad’ to have been connected to a kind of communal round dance to which it formed a repetitive accompaniment. ‘Writer’ is not an appropriate term for those who made the early ballads who didn’t and couldn’t write them down. Lloyd tells us: ‘What was once a kind of narrative incantation becomes a complex tale in recitative form whose aim is to encourage and inspire, and finally the sung narrative becomes a romance with little more purpose than to divert and entertain.’ Transmitted orally, the same ballads appear in many variants, in many areas and in many countries presumably carried by the travellers and entertainers who performed them.

‘Oral transmission’ might seem strange to a modern poet: if you, the performer, can’t quite remember the words (or the tune) you will fill in the gaps as best you can with words of your own, hence you become part author of someone else’s invention. An important aspect of this repeated process seems to be that over time essentials remain and inessentials fall by the wayside – stanzas not needed for the story are dropped, memorable phrases, important events, remain. A stock of known images becomes utilised – images which are familiar, easy to remember – a sort of ballad jargon which evokes the necessary response in the listener and jogs the memory of the singer. In this process of oral/aural transmission the ballad becomes honed, perfected. The Ballads thus developed dramatic and economical ways of telling a good – sometimes fearsome, sometimes mythic, sometimes tragic, sometimes funny – story. The language is vernacular, the imagery conventional – gold is often ‘fine beaten’, wine is ‘blood-red’, blue eyes nearly always ‘bonny’ and so on. Surprisingly these formulae, which can be transferred seamlessly from story to story, do not decline into cliché and give the listener a comforting sense of involvement in, recognition of something timeless and universal. Whereas the literary poet (painstakingly and exactingly reproduced in edition after edition) strives for difference, originality, an individual voice, the ballad is the collective, historical voice of the unlettered, the story of our ancestors be they rich man, poor man, tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, beggarman, thief or any female version thereof.

With the invention of printing and societal change over the middle ages, by the sixteenth century many orally transmitted ballads as well as new-made songs were finding their way into print as ‘broadsides’ or ‘broadsheets’ – single sheets of printed text cheaply sold about the streets of London and other cities. These broadsheets, sometimes folded as ‘chapbooks’, also acted as the first newspapers, telling the stories of the wars, scandals and crimes of the time. Those who propagated them were the buskers of their day – entertaining the population at local fairs, markets and hangings; peddling their wares on street corners. Many of these songs will begin with a line like: ‘Come all you fair and tender ladies...’ or ‘Listen you lively lordlings all...’ or ‘Come gather round my merry lads...’ or some such pressing invitation to the potential audience. Though written down in this way ballads continued to change in the mouths of singers be they professional minstrels, ‘chapmen’, voyaging sailors or itinerant workers.

The ballad made use of conventions which enabled it to be remembered, passed on and communally enjoyed: an established imagery – a stock of phrases that could be transposed from one ballad to another – sometimes a refrain which listeners could join in with as in the story of The Cruel Mother:

She sat down below a thorn
Fine flowers in the valley
And it’s there she has her sweet babe borne
And the green leaves they grow rarely ...

Smile nae sae sweet, my bonny babe
Fine flowers in the valley
And you smile sae sweet you’ll smile me dead
And the green leaves they grow rarely...

and often the classic ballad metre – the quatrain with a four-foot, three-foot line alternation, rhyming ABCB – as in the tragedy of unfaithfulness and revenge, Little Matty Groves (also known as Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard):

...Little Matty Groves he lay down
To take a little sleep
When he awake Lord Donald
Was standing at his feet

Well how do you like my feather bed
And how do you like my sheets
And how do you like my lady gay
Who lies in your arms asleep...

But the longevity of the ballad owes most to its narrative skill. The ballads have stories, mythic, dramatic, tragic, romantic, and it is the stories together with their tunes that move the heart and make them memorable. They tell a tale simply, usually without taking sides. There are not too many adjectives, they don’t comment much and they don’t preach. If there is a moral it is frequently contained in one final stanza. Ballad technique can be compared to the technique of making a film, with quick but telling changes of scene and focus, lingering only where the logic of the drama indicates the need to linger. The stories are often told in dialogue. Little Matty Groves, quoted above, illustrates all these points:

Matty Groves (Little Musgrave) is a young man at Lord Donald’s court;

Lord Donald’s wife fancies him and invites him back while her husband is away in a distant part of his estate;

Matty is uneasy about the proposed tryst, but agrees;

Lord Donald’s servant overhears the conversation and busts a gut to find Lord Donald and let him know;

in the duel that ensues, Lord Donald kills Matty Groves.

After describing the setting and the exchanges between Matty Groves and Lord Donald’s wife we are told in some detail how the foot page runs and swims to get to Lord Donald and in several versions we hear details of exactly how Lord Donald hurries back home. This tension is important to the drama, just as a car chase might be in a thriller. The story then cuts without further ado to the nub – Matty Groves waking to see Lord Donald standing by the bed. After a terse conversation between Lord Donald and Matty it moves swiftly to the fight and its tragic conclusion.

There were scholarly collections of ballads quite early on: Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Minstrelsy,published in 1765, Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 1802 and that of the American academic Francis James Child, who between 1882 and 1898 published and classified the texts of 305 English and Scottish ballads. The sources used varied from earlier broadsheet versions and other compilations to songs collected directly from the singers themselves. These collections were printed without the music of the ballads being included or seriously considered to be of merit. Furthermore some collectors were more or less disparaging of the literary merit of the ballads and had a tendency to ‘correct’ and ‘improve’ them and, as in the case of Sir Walter Scott, to use them as templates for their own compositions. It was not until the late nineteenth/early twentieth Century and particularly with the invention of technology which enabled the direct recording of singers, that the importance and beauty of the ballads as songs became clear. Cecil Sharp, a collector who was also a musician and composer, assisted by Maud Karpeles, brought the ballad in its entirety – words and tune, and later the style of singing employed by ballad singers – into the light. As well as fieldwork in Britain they collected hundreds of English ballads from the Appalachian Mountains in the USA. In the mid-twentieth century these earlier recordings were explored and more field trips made by folklorists who were themselves singers – A.L. Lloyd, Ewan MacColl and others – leading to the folksong revival of the post second-world war period which greatly influences popular music today. Contemporary ballads ‘in the tradition’ began to be made.

(To be concluded in next issue)

Hylda Sims co-runs Fourth Friday at the Poetry Café, Covent Garden, London. Her collection of poems and songs, Sayling the Babel, is published by Hearing Eye. Reaching Peckham, a story in 40 poems, plus CD with accompanying music, is to be republished by Hearing Eye later this year.
www.fourthfriday.co.uk
www.hylda.co.uk