The House Carpenter / James Harris or The Daemon Lover

The title of the ballad is “The House Carpenter”. The title doesn’t rise much expectations in the reader’s mind: the ballad is probably going to talk about a carpenter. But the ballad has also an alternative title: “James Harris or The Daemon Lover”. The reader expectation is to read about a tragic love story and a very dangerous lover.

The ballad is made up of 14 quatrains. It has not a specific rhyme scheme, although there are many rhymes in each quatrain. The ballad is mainly made up of dialogical sequences (the exchange of dialogue between a woman and her lover) but there are no punctuation marks to distinguish the man and the woman while they are speaking.

The first two quatrains introduce the first character: the lover. He addressed his beloved, saying he has just returned from the sea (he may be a seaman) and he had given up to marry the King’s daughter all for the love of her. All the quatrains have a very strong and marked rhythm. The first two lines of both the stanzas show the use of repetition of words (well met) and concepts (I could have married the King’s daughter... She would have married me).

From the third to the sixth stanza the ballad reports the dialogue between the two, a quatrain for each character. Many parts of the speech are repeated: both in the same quatrain and in the first block of stanzas (salt, salt sea line 3 and 16; house carpenter line 11, 13 and 17). Another figure of sound used in the fourth stanza is the alliteration (grass grows green), immediately followed by a repetition. All that choices make the ballad easier to remember. But they also give it peculiar rhythmical and musical aspects, as if the author was trying to convey the sound of the voice and the way of speaking of the lover, trying to persuade to woman to go away with him.

The seventh stanza is a narrative one: the woman decides to go away with her lover,  says goodbye to her little child and flees.

The eighth quatrain opens with a time reference: the scene is set about two weeks after the woman’s departure. She began to cry bitterly.

The ninth and tenth quatrains are another exchange of dialogue between the two: they are structured according to an incremental repetition and the words of the woman trace the ones of the lover.

The eleventh quatrain begins with another time reference similar to the one of the eight quatrain: the scene is set about three weeks after the departure. The ship the two lovers were sailing into sank.

The twelfth quatrain describes the ship sinking, using the incremental repetition (One time/two times/three times around spun). This way the reader can almost see in his mind the ship quickly turning around trying not to sink.

The last two quatrains report the last exchange of dialogue of the two lovers. They have a specular structure:

• in the first two lines the woman asks the lover what hills are those she sees (first fair and high, then dark and low)
• in the last two lines the man answers: the first ones were the hills of Heaven that are forbidden for them. The second ones were the hills of Hell where they are going to go because they are lovers (they had betrayed the sacred bond of matrimony.