TEXTUAL ANALYSIS – The Unquiet Grave

The object of the present work is to analyse the ballad called  “The Unquiet Grave”.

The text is a ballad. The intelligent reader may be curious to find out the reason why the poet refers the adjective “Unquiet” to a  grave.

Words “Unquiet” and “Grave” suggest a sense of sadness. So, maybe the ballad is very sad. 

I think the title refers to something supernatural that cannot rest in its grave because it is troubled by an insistent agitation or dissatisfaction or suffering.The analysis of the poem is meant to discover the message the speaking voice wants to send.

Considering the layout the ballad is long. It is arranged into seven stanzas. All stanzas has of four lines, so they are all quatrains. Indeed some stanzas have got lines longer than the other.

The ballad starts with narration, the reader can understand what the text is about: the narrator is a young man that suffers for his love's death. The first stanza presents the setting and the weather: it rains and a wind blows.

In the second stanza the narrator promises that he would stay on the grave of his love to mourn her death for a year and one day. The young man doesn't want to accept that his time is up.

Twelve months later his lover's ghost appears and asks him why he disturbs her. From here the ballad is a dialogue in which the man exploits his feelings to the ghost. The man wants a kiss her lips and after that he will leave her alone, but she tells him that if he kissed her, he would die. 

Thus the man asks her when they would walk together and he also compares her to a withered flower.
All the text is made up by repetitions and dialogues. Inside the balla dthere are a lot of anaphora, thay are used tosimplify the memorization of the text.

In all stanzas the second and the fourth verse are on rhyme. the change of verb tences is very important from the second to the third line. The reader understands that a lot of time is gone by.

In the end, the ballad is a tragic love story between two young poeple in a supernatural place.