THE HOUSE CARPENTER

The "House Carpenter" is a ballad dealing with love, though in a different way.
The ballad is composed by fourteen four-line stanzas, quatrains, with an irregular ryhme scheme.
It is a dialogue between a sea captain and a carpenter's wife.

The ballad is full of repetition and incremental repetition, there are a lot of alliterations and rhymes. All these constructions are made to help memorization.

The first two stanzas introduced the sea captain, he is talking to the woman and he is called her "True love". He is claimed his decision to not to marry the King's daughter because of his love for her.
In the first, second and third lines the repetitions and the alliteration sounds give to the ballad a slow rhytm and the reader may feel a sense of distress waiting to know what is going to happen; it seems like if the sea captain wants to convince the woman that he really loves her, and this is stated by his speech in the second stanza where he says he renounced even to marry the king's daughter to go to her.
The two stanzas end with the same phrase "All for the love of thee", used to reassert the seaman's love.

The third stanza is the woman's speech. She answered ironically to the seaman, saying him she is already married. But in the following stanza the seaman asks her again to leave with him promising her to go where "the grass grows green" to. This aliteration of the sound "gr" convey the idea of something extrimely beautiful underlined in fact by this repetition.
The woman is not yet sure if leaving or not, but in the fifth stanza the reader can understand she is interested in the man and since if she looses her husband she would remain without everything, in this stanza she asked the seaman if he have enough to matain her away from poverty.
The answer of the seaman is the icing on the cake: he promises she will have at her command a lot of ships.

The reader can immediately understands how the seaman's language is more musical and there is more sound in his speeches. His captivating and crawlered intentions are imediatelly relized by the reader. The woman instead seems more superficial and not yet relly sure, she only hopes to improve her situation.

The following stanzas explains better the woman's feelings: from the seventh one where she is imposed to leave her baby, to the tenth one where she is missing her baby. She can't stand the distance from the baby, but at the same time, she underlines she is not missing her husband. In the tenth stanza the woman answered the sailman's using same constructions used by him in the ninth stanza.
; she wants to explain immediately to the seaman, she is not thinking to her husband.
<...Weep your for your golden store...> <...Or for any golden store...>
<..Never you shall see anymore> <...Never I shall see anymore> she answeres drawing on his words.
The word "never" repeated three times at the start of the last line in stanzas number 9 and 10 underlines how the situation can't change, and introduced to the reader that probably something irreversible will happen. The word is in fact repeated in stanza 11 where the sailman tells how the ship sink; at the end of the stanza the word "anymore" states again the end of their voyage. The twelfth stanza is a description of the sink of the ship.

The last two stanzas are very similar and they are, at the same time, opposite. The first one is about the Heaven: it is depict with hills high and fair; the other one is about the Hell and it is described with dark and low hills.
The ballad provides an example of a bad behaviour and therefore a sad end with the punishment: the Hell ( ).