Then she spake, the fair Iseult, From over the foam : "Nay, but Tristram should not die When I come home." Out on the floor the priests were standing, Queen Iseult came where Tristram lay, To many a man in the world is given The queen knelt down and died there, Iseult, Out on the floor the priests they stood, Their dirges said: The bells of gold were rung for Iseult And Tristram dead. (Nothing for them was shapen but to sunder.) The scheme of this verse is a familiar one in English, and it is used in popular lyric poetry, though not in the ballads. It comes in German poetry also, and loses nothing of its grace; there are certain kinds of verse that seldom go wrong; they keep their true nature in any language: "O burmans sön, lat röselin stan ! se sint nicht din ; Now this is found in the ballad poetry of the Romance tongues pretty frequently in French, Italian, Catalan, etc. Allons au bois, charmante brune, This French ballad is on the same story as the Italian Donna Lombarda, which has the same form of verse: "Amei-me mi, dona Lombarda amei-me mi." "O cume mai volì che fassa, che j'o'l marì.” 2 This stave is found in old French poetry in various combinations, one of them specially interesting, because it is the well-known stanza of Burns, which appears itself to have been originally a ballad measure of the old sort used in caroles. The well-known form-three lines and a half, then one and a half-is explained in the following way. The second line was originally the first refrain, and the one and a half concluding the stanza are the second part of the refrain, as in the old example analysed by Jeanroy (p. 412): Main se leva bele Aeliz, (Dormez jalous ge vos en pri) (Migno tement la voi venir, 1 Rolland, No. cclix.; iii. p. 10. " 2 Nigra, i.; also in Rolland, loc. cit., immediately following the French version Note that in the Italian each short phrase is repeated: Amei-me mi, amei-me mi ”— -as in "The robin to the wren's nest cam keekin in, cam keekin in.” But this repeating is not universal; the French tune, e.g., does not repeat "allons au bois" in the stanza quoted. The concluding lines, "Biau se para," etc., are thus a metrical period by themselves, following the first refrain, and the form of them is easily detached and made into an independent stanza, which is that of the French ballad, Allons au bois, and of the Danish Sivard, the Icelandic Tristram. It is possible to go further, and to find in southern ballad-poetry not only the abstract scheme of verse, but verse and words agreeing to the same effect as in the north. The Icelandic poem of Tristram has repeated a common ballad motive, of the lover coming too late and hearing the funeral bells. It is given in Italian, in verse essentially the same as that of the Tristramskvaði. In Il Giovane Soldato,1 a ballad of Pontelagoscuro in Emilia, a young soldier asks leave of his captain to go home and see his betrothed, who is lying sick. He arrives only in time to hear the bells and meet the procession; and this rustic Italian ballad has the same mode of verse as the northern poem of Iseult : Quand l'è sta arent al castello, Al sentiva sunar : Questo l'è al son dla miè cara mrosa, Fermito là o ti la purtantina, Riposat un po : Ch' a daga un basin a la miè mrosa, Parla, parla, bochetta dorà, Ma cosa vot, se liè l'è morta ? Parlart la non pol. "When he came to his town he heard the bells ringing. They are ringing for my own dear love; they are coming 1 Ferraro, Canti popolari di Ferrara, etc., 1877. after with her bier. Stay there, set down the bier; rest a little, that I may give a kiss to my love, and then I will go away. Speak, speak, mouth of my love, answer me a little.' The friends say: "What wilt thou, when she is dead? She cannot speak to thee." This is poetry also a common motive no doubt, but it can hardly be mere coincidence that brings the south and north so close together as in these two ballads, in spite of the long interval of time, and the distance between Iceland and Italy. IV. The great difficulty with the Danish ballads (as with the English) is to understand how the imported French poetical forms came to be adapted so thoroughly, not only to render northern themes-there is nothing so strange in that-but to carry on the most ancient popular fashions of thought and imagination. Nothing in the form of the Danish ballads is national or northern. Even the habit of alliteration, which might naturally enough have been carried from the old northern verse into the new rhymes, is allowed to drop, not only in Denmark,1 but largely also in the Icelandic ballads, though in all other Icelandic verse, to the present day, the old prescription of the three alliterative syllables is retained. But while the change from Northern to Romance forms is carried out so thoroughly, the Danish ballads lose nothing of their home-bred quality in other respects: there is nothing artificial or foreign about their matter or spirit; they are in a foreign kind of verse, but their ideas, their 1 Steenstrup, Vore Folkeviser, pp. 125-137. manners, are in some respects more ancient than the poems of the "Elder Edda." Some of those have been called ballads, indeed, by the editors of the Oxford Corpus Poeticum, and there are many points of likeness. The old poem of the Fetching of Thor's Hammer is much the same in scale and method as the later rhyming ballad on the same story.1 But the rhyming ballads are fond of antique simple things which the more careful poems of the "Elder Edda" have rejected, e.g. the old tricks or repetition, found all over the world wherever poets are not too high-minded or artificial : Aft ha'e I ridden thro' Striveling town But ne'er rade I thro' Striveling town Aft hae I ridden thro' Striveling town But ne'er rade I thro' Striveling town -Young Waters, Buchan's version. There are figures of repetition, it is true, in the old heroic poetry, but they are not of this sort; the repetitions in the Danish ballads are exactly of this sort, the very same thing in all but the language.2 As "wind and weet" is changed to “wind and rain ”’ in Young Waters, so for instance "earth" and “mould ” are changed in Danish; "Queen Bengerd lies in the black earth, and the good man keeps his ox and cow; Queen Bengerd lies under the black mould, and * Cf. Gummere, The Beginnings o, Poetry, p. 197, sqq., on ballad repetition. There appears to be a good specimen of this kind of rhetoric in the Babylonian Descent of Ishtar; as there are many in the Tristram ballad, quoted above. |