Text analysis - The House Carpenter

"The House Carpenter" is an anonymous ballad that belongs to popular ballad.

Reading the ballad I understand that it deals with tragic love and infidelity. It is a story that has two principal characters: a sailor man and a woman. There are two other characters in the background: the woman's husband and her child. Characters are sketched and they are described during their actions but not considering their emotions or characteristic. In fact in the text the events of the story are most important compared to descriptions.

The text is written in fourteen quatrains that are fifty-six lines.

In the ballad repetition, alliteration and figures of sound are used a lot because they are important to help memorization being ballad a oral form of poetry. For example, in the first stanza, in particular in the first line "well met" is repeated twice and "met, met, my" are an alliteration. Go on with the second lines you can find the repetition of "well met" again as refrain and in the third lines "salt, salt, sea" is an alliteration that has a repetition inside. In this stanza rhyme scheme is ABBB but the other stanzas rhyme in ABCB.

A narrator describes the story but in the stanzas there are a lot of direct speech that create a conversation between characters staging where narrator stops in and goes on with story. In addition narrator introduces direct speech too.

In the first stanza there is an introduction of the story and there is the return of the lover. In the second stanza the sailor man declares his love for the girl. After that the girl is not convinced to go with him because she had married a carpenter and she is afraid of poverty. But the man convinced her to leave for the "grass grows green" and the "salt, salt, see", that are alliteration that underline his entreaty, and he promises her "six ship, six ship" (alliteration that evidences the quantity of the offer).  Then she decides to go with her sailor man, she says goodbye to her child and she leaves. In the eight and eleventh stanzas there is a refrain "well, they had not been gone but about three weeks" that underline the elapse of time and her impatience. At the end the tragic epilogue: the boat sank and they died. At this point of the story there is a supernatural description. There are died and they see two kind of hills: the Heaven and the Hill. But the sailor man, with sadness, says to his love that they can go only to dark and low hills because they must go in the Hell.