Textuality » 3A Interacting
THE THREE RAVENS
The Three Ravens is an anonymous medieval ballad. Right from the title, the reader is informed that the ballad will be about sad topics, since ravens are considered to bring bad luck in popular culture.
The song is made up of ten stanzas; the first one has seven lines, the others have two. It presents rhymes, assonance, repetition and alliteration, to ease memorization throughout the generations. It consists of a mixture of dialogue and narration.
The first stanza introduces the situation: three ravens are sitting on a bench of a tree, with their black plumage. The description is repeated three times and in the entire stanza the word "downe" recurs eight times. This both helped people memorize the text and creates an atmosphere of sadness.
In the second stanza the first raven asks to his mate where they will have breakfast. This question arouses suspicion in the reader, because ravens can be scavengers.
In the third stanza the second raven answers saying that a knight is lying dead in a nearby meadow. In the following two stanzas, the raven adds that also his hawks and hounds are dead and are lying close to him, as they still want to protect their master. Probably the knight was killed in an ambush, since during the Middle Ages conflicts between England and Scotland were frequent. However, he may have been slain by a supernatural creature, such as a witch or a dragon. Anyway, the ballad does not specify the cause of the death clearly.
Afterwards, the narrator tells the reader that a lady, maybe his lover, came to him. She lifts up his head and kisses his blooding wounds; then, she buries him. Before the evening, she has died herself because of the sorrow.
The ballad closes with the exaltation of the knight's nobility, for which God had given him such a lover, such hawks and such hounds, that they protected him until their death.
The whole ballad is permeated by a sense of sadness, underlined also through the sound devices. The anaphor of "downe" (l. 10 and 16) highlights the knight's death, while the one of "she" and "and" (l. 18 - 23) underpins the lady's despair and the succession of her actions. The normal word order is sometimes deviated to create rhyming couplets (e.g. at line 9).
From the ballad we can understand how dangerous the world was during the Middle Ages, and therefore the consequent importance of the value in battle, here symbolized by the hawks and the hounds.
THE UNQUIET GRAVE
The Unquiet Grave is an anonymous medieval ballad. From the title the reader understands that the ballad will be about sad topics or death itself. Indeed, it is about a tragic love story. The ballad is made up of nine stanzas; the first and the last ones have five lines, the others are quatrains. However, the fifth line of the five-line stanzas is the repetition of the fourth. The ballad follows the rhyme scheme ABCB and, as the other ballads, makes great use of sound devices to ease memorization. The song is narrated in first person by the protagonist of the story, but contains also dialogued parts.
The first stanza introduces the situation: the protagonist states his only lover has died and she now lies in the greenwood, under the rain and the wind.
The second stanza describes the reaction of the narrator and main character: he has been sitting on her grave and mourning her for a year and one day. Here the expression "a twelvemonth and a day" is preferred, because it gives a greater impression of continuity and persistence.
The third stanza introduces the character of the lady's ghost; after a year and one day, she asks her lover why he does not let her sleep peacefully.
In the following stanza, he answers that he wants only a kiss from her, and then he will go away. To underline the importance of the kiss, the narrator uses an incremental repetition (l. 14 - 15).
The lady answers that if he kisses her, he will die, since she is as cold as clay. Besides, her words create a parallelism with the narrator's ones in the fourth stanza: in the first two lines both of them use an anaphoric construction; in the third lines both of them start with "and" and speak about the kiss, while both the fourth lines cover the consequences. In this stanza there is also the alliteration of the sound /k/ (cold, clay, kiss at line 20), which underlines her toughness.
In the sixth stanza, the lady says she will revive only if water from a desert, blood from a stone and milk from a virgin are brought to her. All these conditions are impossible and therefore underpin the impossibility of her revival. This is reinforced also by the anaphor "go fetch me..." (l. 22 - 24).
In the following stanza the lady proceeds the discussion saying that, in the meadow where they would walk, the first flower she has ever seen is withered and dry. This highlights the idea of death and is used by the lady to console her lover. He draws on her sweetheart's words and says he cannot do anything but mourning, underlining again the same concept.
In the last stanza, the main character asks her when they will meet again. The ghost answers him that they will meet when "the oaken leaves that fall from trees are green and spring up again", that is a euphemism to say it's impossible for them to live together again.