THE HOUSE CARPENTER (text analysis)

Just reading the title I expect the ballad will be about love. Maybe there is a lady who falls in love with her house carpenter. One of the most frequent topic of ballads is tragic love story, so this ballad can have a tragic conclusion.

The ballad is organized into 14 quatrains (stanzas of four lines each) and the rhyme scheme in the first stanza is ABBB while in the other stanzas the rhyme scheme is ABCB.

The story is about a married woman who falls in love with a sailor so she leaves her family to stay with him. Unfortunately the sailor never comes back and the woman dies alone.

The characters are just sketched (typical of ballads) but there are lots of references to the setting (salt see, grass grows green).

The ballad has lots of repetition, as for example "well met", "weep", "hills", "salt", ... These repetitions help the memorization, in fact in the past ballads were told orally. The narrator uses also alliterations, internal rhyme and refrains to make the memorization easier too.

In the first stanza there is the repetition of the phrase "well met" and the word "salt", so the metre is alliterative.

In the third stanza the reader finds an alliteration of sound D. Maybe it underlines the ironic hardness of woman's word.

In the fourth stanza there is an alliteration of sound GR, so it speeds up the rhythm, while in the fifth and in the sixth stanzas there are internal rhymes (go along, ten men).

The next stanza is full of E sound. This sound underlines that the woman greets her baby quickly to escapes with the sailor.

The ballad has also refrains. In fact the eleventh stanza is similar to the eighth stanza. There are also little differences as three weeks instead of two weeks.

The reader finds also the intrusion of the narrator. The ballad in fact has both dialogues and narration.   

COMPREHENSION

1. •1.      The two characters speaking are a sea captain and a married woman. They are in love.
2. •2.      The man has given up a King's daughter for love.
3. •3.       The man wants the woman escapes with him.
4. •4.       She need to know how the man will maintain her.
5. •5.      She felt sad because she left her baby.
6. •6.        The lovers and their ship sinks.
7. •7.       The man should be the devil.
8. •8.       Heaven and Hell are described because the lovers died.
9. •9.       The woman goes to Hell because she has committed a sin following the devil.
10. •10  I think the best title is "The daemon lover".