Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/95

INTRODUCTION, Ixxxix There is a feast in your father s house^ ( The broom blooms bonniey and so it is fair) It becomes you and me to be very douce^ {And we'll never gang up to the broom nae mair)A However, putting the dreams aside,^ the memories and hauntings provoked by this stretched metre of an antique 1 Of most of these refrains Motherwell remarks that they have meanings lost to our ears, but significant enough to men of older time. Steenstrup says that the refrain " always strikes the * note ' or mood of the ballad." Of merely inter jectional or inarticulate refrains we have many cases ; for example, the " O " (or " A " : see Webbe, Discourse of Engl. Poetrie, ed. Arber, p. 36, with the allusion to " Robyn hoode ") at the end of a line : see Nos. 58, B ; 65, E ; 100, F, and others, in Child's Ballads. Such, too, are the "Fal, lal" (No. 164) and the frequent "Haydoune" (81, A) with its variations. Combinations of the inarticulate with the articulate refrain meet us in " Earl Brand ": Ay lilly lilly tally All i the night sae early ^ — and in " Babylon," where a meaning is evident ; while no meaning attaches to refrains like (i) : Jennifer gentle and rosemaree As the dew flies ever the mulberry tree. Refrain of the season is common (4, and see 10, T) : Aye as the gowans grow gay The first morning in May. A refrain, or genuine burden, longer than the stanza of the ballad, is found in " The Elfin Knight," (2, A) : compare " The Twa Sisters," and " The Three Ravens." The iteration of ballads, which may stand in no distant relation to the refrain, is almost identical with the latter in " Lord Randal," or with shorter form, in " Edward." In version J of "Lord Randal" (Child, I, 163 f.) each verse is repeated, in the form a a b b iox the stanza ; see F in " Lamkin " (Part IV, p. 328). In four-line stanzas the fourth line is often repeated {a b c b b) see 33, B, G; 52, A; 70, B; 75, H, and many others. The third and fourth lines may both be repeated: see 58, D ; 87, B ; and so with the first and second : see 97, B. In ab c b by the repeated line is usually shorter by a measure than the fourth. Scott has imitated this refrain in his song in Rokeby^ — "A weary lot is thine, fair maid." ^ " La po^sie," says Sainte-Beuve in a sentence that applies as well Digitized by LjOOQIC