Popular British Ballads, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 4 (of 4) — A Closer Reading

Historical Ballads and Political Memory

The excerpts include several poems that use the ballad’s repetitive structure and direct speech to commemorate specific historical events. “The Battle of the Boyne,” adapted by A. P. Graves, narrates the 1690 battle from a Williamite perspective, with lines like “King William threw his bomb-balls in / And set them all on fire.” The poem’s refrain-like repetition of “over the water” reinforces the crossing of the Boyne as a central motif. In contrast, “Shule Agra” voices a Jacobite woman’s lament after the Flight of the Wild Geese: “But when King James was forced to flee, / The Wild Geese spread their wings to sea.” The poem’s refrain “Shule, shule, shule agra!” and its Irish-language glosses signal a cultural identity tied to loss and exile. These ballads do not simply report events but shape political memory through emotional appeal and vernacular detail.

Supernatural and Gothic Strains

Several ballads in the volume draw on supernatural or Gothic motifs, though the excerpts provide only glimpses. The table of contents lists titles such as “The Witch-Mother,” “The Demon of the Gibbet,” and “The Ballad of the Bier that Conquered,” suggesting a preoccupation with death, haunting, and the macabre. In “The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire,” Jean Ingelow blends natural disaster with domestic tragedy: the speaker recalls her son’s wife Elizabeth, whose song “Cusha! Cusha! Cusha!” is heard before the flood. The poem’s refrain “Play uppe ‘The Brides of Enderby’” ties the rising tide to a local church bell tradition, grounding the supernatural in regional folklore. The inclusion of such pieces alongside historical ballads indicates that the editor valued the ballad’s capacity to evoke both the uncanny and the everyday.

Regional Voices and Dialect

The volume’s ballads frequently employ dialect or regional speech to establish setting and character. In “The High Tide,” the milking song “Cusha! Cusha!” mimics the call to cows, while the narrator’s archaic diction (“myne ears,” “doth still abide”) creates a deliberately antique tone. The Irish ballads go further, incorporating Gaelic phrases with translations: “Go-thee-thu, mavourneen slaun!” (Farewell, my darling) and “Shule, shule, shule agra!” (Come, come, my love). These linguistic markers serve both authenticity and exoticism, appealing to readers interested in regional cultures. The editor’s choice to include such poems alongside standard English ballads suggests a deliberate effort to represent the diversity of British and Irish ballad traditions, even as the volume’s title emphasizes “British” identity.

Readers approaching this volume should be aware that it represents a curated selection of literary ballads rather than a comprehensive anthology of traditional oral verse. The editor’s choices reflect late-Victorian tastes for historical romance, regional color, and the supernatural. The illustrations by W. Cubitt Cooke, though not reproduced in this digital edition, originally accompanied the text and may be consulted in the print source. For those interested in the evolution of the ballad form, comparing these literary examples with the earlier volumes in the series would be instructive.

Sometimes, leafing through these old literary ballads—Kipling’s sea-ghosts, Ingelow’s quiet sorrows—I feel the same ache I find in A Celtic Psaltery Being Mainly Renderings in English Verse from Irish & Welsh Poetry — Themes and Context. Both whisper of a place where the land remembers its dead. They sit well together on the shelf, sharing that longing.