Textuality » 3A Interacting
Now I am going to compare two ballads: Lord Randal and The Wife of Usher’s Well.
I subdivide my work in four parts:
1- I will tell about the structure and the content.
2- I am going to deal with sound aspects.
3- I will analyze langue and theme.
They are ballad and they are arranged in ten and twelve quatrains.
The first is a dialogue beetwen Lord Randal and his mother. The mother asks to her son where he was, who he met, what the person who her son has met gave her son and generally what he did while hunting. When the mother discovered that her son was poisoned she starts to ask to her son what he would had leave to him family.
The Wife of Usher’s Well tells about a mother who loses her three sons but she thinks they are still alive. Lord Randal is a dialogue and the first five stanzas are very similar beetwen their, because there are always the same three lines. And the same for the last five stanzas.
The Wife of Usher’s Well alternates narrative with dialogue.
In the ballads there are some typical features of ballad, there are repetion and alliteration.
In the second ballad the poet creates with the alliteration of the sound “w” the idea of the soffer of the mother for the lost of the three sons, but he uses also the alliteration of the sound “w” to speed up the reader.
In Lord Randal the poet uses the repetion of five words to convey the link of affect of the mother for the son and the alliteration of the sound “m” recreates the feeling of suffering of the mother and the alliteration of sound w at line four also focuses the reader attention on the physical weariness.
Lord Randal is a scottish ballad and it is written in old English, it is more difficult than The Wife of Usher’s Well because it come from Britain.
Lord Randal has the theme of the tragic story but The Wife of Usher’s Well has the theme of the supernatural.