Textuality » 3A Interacting
THE HOUSE CARPENTER
Reading the title, the reader's expectations are to read about someone that does the carpenter has a job, or someone that is related with him.
The whole ballad is composed by 14 quatrains that alternate dialogues and narrations. Instead of other ballads that are full of rhymes, it has not always got them. On the contrary this poem is full of repetitions permitting the ballad to be handed over through centuries. It provides the frequent repetition of key words (salt sea, house carpenter, etc.) and lines. The language used is easy and it is mixed with some words taken from the Scottish dialect. Always the first and the third lines are evidenced in every quatrain because they always talk about the most important facts happened in the stanza.
Up to the 6th stanza there is a dialogue between a woman and a seaman. He tries to convince her to leave her husband and her child to go away with him. She doesn't want to leave them until the seaman tells her that she won't never be poor. In this dialogue the sailor is a tempter that promises lots of things to the young lady, but she always throw him back to reality.
The 7th stanza is a description of what she did before leaving: she kissed her baby and then went away. She gave him three kisses, a religious number (sign of the presence of the religious matter in the poem).
In the following quatrain the unknown narrator tells us a period of time in which she began to be sad and complain about her choice.
If in the first half of the ballad things are OK, from the 8th stanza things turn bad for the girl and the seaman until they die ( stanza n° 11). They die after one month of travelling immediately after the regret of the woman for have left her house carpenter for the love of a seaman.
The house carpenter convey the idea of someone safe and unfailing, on the contrary the seaman depicts the image of the obscure world. The lady left her husband for an uncertain way of life, and considering that the ballad was written in the Middle Ages (a period in which women have to stay at home looking at the children and the house) it may have been a form of advertisement and instruction for common people.
This theory is reinforced by the last two stanzas where the seaman tells the woman that they will go to hell and not to heaven. This was a terrible thing for Medieval people because all their lives have the function to provide them a peacefully life after death.