“Her breath was strang, her hair was lang / And twisted twice about the tree”

[larryhammer]

When you are reading a collection of ballads, bounding along through “Earl Mar’s Daughter” and “The Twa Sisters” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well” then suddenly come BLAM! up against “A Lyke-Wake Dirge,” it becomes all the more obvious that while this has the form of a ballad—ballad stanzas with refrain lines—it is not a ballad in genre.* It’s moralizing framed as instructions for a newly dead soul. It’s didactic, not narrative.

Similarly, there are many poems that use the same form as a haiku, but are not a haiku in genre.


* And if it’s immediately followed by “The Douglas Tragedy” and “Fair Annie,” you know the editor Doesn’t Get This.

---L.

Subject quote from Kemp Owyne, immediately before “Earl Mar’s Daughter” in the collection.

Comments

[swan_tower]

Which collection?

[larryhammer]

The Home Book of Verse edited by Burton Egbert Stevenson.

[cmcmck]

Some of those 'lang sangs' are incredible things!

[larryhammer]

Indeed -- as is this. But they are very different kinds of incredible things.