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The twentieth century collections with music included brought the ballads to the attention of singers and they were a crucial component of the folksong revival. But the first impact of the eighteenth century, non-musical, ballad collections was on poets. They were influential, perhaps central, in the development of the Romantic Movement. In Lyrical Ballads (1801) Wordsworth writes in his preface or ‘Advertisement’ that the purpose of the book is to ascertain ‘how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure.’ Romantic Poets turned to the ballad with the idea of moving towards a simpler, more vernacular utterance as well as bringing the thoughts and feelings of ‘the middle and lower classes of society’ into frame. This was considered by Wordsworth to be ‘an experiment’. The Romantic Poets also sought to use the ballad form as a basis for their own moral, political, aesthetic, individualistic expression. Hence the ‘literary’ ballad becomes suffused with opinion, ‘poetic’ imagery, interior thought processes which dilute its narrative strength and add to its length. It becomes somewhat indigestible. Take for example Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner – a superb story with memorable images many of which have passed into the general language:

As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

but by the time you’ve coaxed yourself through all one hundred and forty stanzas (and I doubt many people did or do) many of them struggling with religious and moral questions of culpability, retribution, conscience, penitence, the story becomes confused. One can’t help feeling that had this work been subjected to the ‘folk process’ of oral transmission over the years it would have become a lot shorter and considerably better. Importantly, readers would have been left to consider questions of morality for themselves. If we consider Rime in comparison with another famous ballad of disaster at sea, the traditional Sir Patrick Spens, we see many advantages to the latter where the story is told simply and briskly without moralising.

A similar criticism applies to Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol with its hundred or so stanzas about an execution which took place during his imprisonment there. Whilst skilfully drawing on traditional ballad style, his commentary on the event ranges on and on, well beyond the dramatic moment of the hanging itself. It is a great piece of propaganda against capital punishment with some wonderful lines – “that little tent of blue / Which prisoners call the sky” – and its repetition and length echo Wilde’s own incarceration where “each day is like a year” but as ballad it is flawed by its prolixity. Kipling captured the vernacular and style of the ballad and the subject of execution more succinctly in Danny Deever (Barrack Room Ballads). On a more romantic theme Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci is beautiful and admirably crafted but is almost a deliberate parody of the early magical ballads with alien undertones of a more courtly tradition as its French title (borrowed from a French 15th Century poet, Alain Chartier) suggests. It feels ‘archaic’ in a way that traditional ballads do not.

The ‘literary canon’ of ballads doesn’t seem linked to today’s world and doesn’t encourage the composition of more tuneless examples. And as Robert Frost said: ‘Voice and ear are at a loss to what to do with the ballad until supplied with the tune it was written to go with. Unsung, it stays halflacking.’ It leaves, as A L Lloyd added, ‘not only voice and ear at a loss, but heart as well.’ Yet the ballad, in its traditional form, is worth a look for contemporary poets. Much current poetry lacks both rhyme and reason for the reader. The poet’s individual experience, expressed in an idiosyncratic and unstructured way, does not always enthuse or move us – its very (sought after) particularity can preclude communication. Nor do we often find a ‘hook’ – a refrain or familiar phrase that might resonate in the mind, a rhyme or rhythm that might assist us to learn and get to know the poem. Modern poetry can lack narrative. These may be some of the reasons why the audience for contemporary poetry is small. The great ballads are not poems in the individualistic, literary, soulsearching sense. Nor do they spend long on description. They get on with the story – and the story is what most listeners, from the beginning of time, from Oedipus to EastEnders, from Beowulf to Bridget Jones, want to hear. To lose narrative is to lose customers. People want to know what happens next, how the story ends.

Speaking of which, the story of Little Matty Groves, mentioned in Part One, ends, like many a ballad, horribly. Having killed Matty, Lord Donald asks his wife which of them she preferred:

Up and spoke his own dear wife
Never heard to speak so free
I’d rather a kiss from dead Matty’s lips
Than you or your finery

And then Lord Donald he jumped up
Loudly he did bawl
He stabbed his wife all through the heart
And pinned her against the wall

A grave a grave Lord Donald cried
To put these lovers in
But bury my lady at the top
For she was of noble kin

The story of Matty Groves leaves us with many questions. They are about ends rather than means. Why was the ‘little foot page’ so anxious to let his master know? Was he the true villain, a traitor to his class? How much is the wife culpable and how much the victim of an arranged marriage to a rich old bully? How much does the story tell us about the changing role of the aristocracy in England, the ascent of the common man? What is love, anger, violence, treachery all about? Whose side are we on? Who do we blame? Is it just that ‘stuff happens’? These questions are as relevant to modern life as to the distant times when the ballad was made, hence it speaks to us, moves us. And perhaps they are more important than questions of the individual’s poetic consciousness and its utterance. Matty Groves is a frightful affair of lust, betrayal and violence, but no more so than those we can read about or watch on TV any day of the week.

Maybe the ballad form could be a place to start for those poets, who, like me, feel it is important to write about the sometimes funny, sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrible events ‘out there’ but don’t know quite how to begin. Traditional ballads adapt well to telling about the present as many a contemporary singer songwriter has shown. And if we lack a tune, maybe someone else will provide one, or we can use, as has been done many times before, an existing ballad air. As Wordsworth hoped to show, the spoken language of the common muse does lend itself to ‘poetic pleasure’ quite readily. Though in many instances it is the soaring melody of a well-sung ballad that makes your hairs stand on end, this by no means invalidates the text.

To get back to my original thought – remembering and being moved (and on the subject of ballads about executions) – I’ll finish with Ewan MacColl’s The Ballad of Tim Evans, written about an infamous miscarriage of justice in the Nineteen-Fifties, a modern tragedy told simply and devastatingly and not to be forgotten. It works, even without its sturdy tune.

Hylda Sims co-runs Fourth Friday (www.fourthfriday.co.uk) 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 out now from Hearing Eye. (more at www.hylda.co.uk)