Ballads and Narrative Poems

 

Title: Ballads and Narrative Poems

Compiled and edited by: T W Moles

Publisher: Longmans, Green and Co, London

Year published: 1954

175 pages

From the introduction:

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON in one of his essays remarked, "To pass from hearing literature to reading it is to take a great and dangerous step. With not a few, I think, a large proportion of their pleasure then comes to an end; 'the malady of not marking' overtakes them; they read thenceforward by the eye alone and hear never again the chime of fair words or the march of the stately period."

If this warning is needed when we read lyrical poetry, it is still more urgent when we read narrative poems; for when we read songs we do tend to hear in our minds the music and rhythm of the lines, but in reading a poem which narrates a story, we may become so interested in the story itself that we fail to notice the chime and the march, and in so doing we lose much of the enjoyment which the poet himself experienced when writing the poem and which he intended us to share with him.

This enjoyment of rhythm is associated for most of us with the nursery rhymes which were said and at times sung to us in our childhood days and, even when we have reached the years of grown-up wisdom, these nursery poems come back hauntingly and pleasingly to our minds.

In this selection, the poems are grouped into three sections.

Section One consists of poems written in continuous verse; Section Two consists of traditional and modern ballads; and section Three consists of poems written in stanza-form but not conforming to the ballad tradition.

Moreover, within each section the poems have, when possible, been grouped according to subject ortreatment: thus in Section One the first five poems deal with myths and legends; in Section Two, of the modern ballads the last three have love as their theme: and in Section Three the battle-poems are placed together.