Poetry and Poetics–Lit 204

“Lord Randal” was a fascinating ballad, and my favorite of this week’s readings. It has two main refrains, “For I’m wearied with hunting, and fain wad lie down” and “For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.” The change from one to the other happens after it is revealed to the audience that Lord Randal’s hounds and hawks have died, and that he is also dying (quite the dramatic turn). The ballad starts out appearing as a love song, and that quickly changes to the point where Lord Randal essentially curses his love with “hell and fire” after realizing that she is killing him. I thought it was interesting how it was his mother who was the one who cared for him as he died and realized that he was dying in the first place. It makes Lord Randal seem younger, that he has his mother make his bed for him (especially since he is a lord, and the family should have staff for that), and that she calls him her “handsome young man” throughout the ballad. It’s as though she is coaxing information out of him the entire time, almost like a parent does with a child that doesn’t want to say what they did at school that day. The question and answer form is in itself very musical–there are tons of examples in music where an instrumentalist has to address the same type of call-and-response phrasing, and it goes back even to the idea of birdsong, and the way that one bird can generate a response from another. The consistency in words and pattern bring more attention to any changes, so the sixth stanza, the only one where the mother is exclaiming rather than inquiring, becomes the most important. It’s the only moment with an exclamation point in the poem, and it adds a sense of resignation to Lord Randal, since he himself does not change in demeanor. His claim that he has found his true-love in the second stanza implies that he is not aware of his imminent death until his mother unveils it, but he does not react to the news with any great emotion, almost revealing him to be in a sort of trance. 

I also spent a long time listening to various versions of the ballad, and the one I’ve pasted below was my favorite. It has different, more modern lyrics than the original in the anthology, and it occasionally changes lyrics to the point of changing the meaning, which made it not very useful in understanding the poem itself. However, I think the main purpose of a lot of these early ballads was entertainment, and this version was the one I enjoyed the most: https://youtu.be/Dqw6Pz8tGFM?si=mNRLBAggp_vpLynJ.

Of all our readings, I was most interested in the poem I Have a Young Sister. I was unsure of what specific type of meter the poem was written in, but I thought it could potentially be a trochaic meter, given when I read it out loud, I instinctively read it with stress on the first syllable and no stress on the subsequent syllable. As I read it, the overarching theme of this poem was the loss and regaining of innocence through youth. In multiple instances, the author uses the imagery of the natural world to convey a sense of hardening through maturity— a cherry developing its pit, a dove growing its bones, a briar becoming encased in bark. Each thing is delicate, sweet, and pure. As they and the author experience the world’s harshness, they become hardened and irreversibly changed in tangible and intangible ways. Yet, the poem describes a sort of idealism, the blissful ignorance of youth in the form of the “young sister.” She sees a world of cherries without pits, doves without bones, and briars without bark. In her naiveté, she encourages the narrator, her older sibling, to engage with and perceive things the way she does. To the narrator, it seems impossible. They cannot fathom life without its markings of unpleasantness. As the poem later points out, there is a state in which this vulnerability can exist, a quality that connects the sister to the dove without bones, the cherry without a pit, and the briar without bark: youth.