Bonny Barbara Allen – Anonymous – page 36-37 – text analysis

 

 

1)      TITLE: is the first element to analyze to see what expectations it creates in the reader, who has to make conjectures (a hypothesis that the reader makes) about the content starting from the text’s title.

 

Bonny Barbara Allen might be a woman who lived in British territory during the medieval period, involved in a love story. I can say that because of the introduction before the ballad and by watching the three images which reminds me the medieval age.

 

2)      LAYOUT: gives us information about the type of the text we are going to read.

 

The text has the typical structure of a medieval ballad: it has short stanzas made up of four lines (quatrains), it has repetitions of words and lines, it has a mixture of dialogue and narration, the narrative is very fast and events are series of rapid flashes, there are both real and supernatural characters and the theme is tragic love.

 

3)      STRUCTURE: is made up of the component parts of the text.

 

The text is arranged into eight quatrains with the typical ballad’s structure.

 

4)      DENOTATION, COMPREHENSION: to read the text and to understand what it’s about is the pre-requisite for structure analysis.

 

1-4 On about the 11st of November, in autumn, in the West country, Sir John Graeme fell in love with Barbara Allen.

5-8 He sent a man to her house in town and asked Barbara to follow him to his master’s dwelling, if she really was the woman he was looking for.

9-12 Slowly she got up and reached the bed where the man was lying, she moved the curtains and told the young man he was dying.

13-16 He said he was very sick and she was the reason of his illness; she replied he wasn’t his disease’s cause not even if his blood flow out of his heart.

17-20 She reminded the man when she looked for him in taverns, when he used to drink without caring of her.

21-24 He stared at the wall: he was dying; he said farewell to his friends, asking them to be kind to Barbara Allen.

25-28 Slowly she got up and left him; crying she said she couldn’t stay there since he had died.

29-33 She had walked for two miles when she heard the dead-bell ringing and each bell’s toll remembered she was his death’s reason.

 

5)      CONNOTATION: is made up of some levels which answer the questions What? How? Why? like phonological level, semantic level, syntactic level and rhetorical level.

 

Phonological level: the text doesn’t follow a precise rhyme scheme: they are scattered all around the ballad.

Rhymes:

vv. 10-11-12: lying, by, dying

vv.21,23: wall, all

vv.26, 28: him, him

 

 

Semantic level: the sentences are quite simple and easy to translate, except for three-four terms written as an archaic word and some phrases are written without following the typical word order required from the English language

 

Syntactic level: in the first stanza the author writes an introduction about the tragic love story; in the second quatrain the writer tell us about the meeting between the servant and Barbara; in the next stanzas there’s a description and a dialogue of Sir John with Barbara, who talks to him in a cruel and disinterested way. The last two quatrains show John’s death and highlights the bells’ toll which remind Barbara his guilt.

 

Rhetorical level:

Anaphora: v.9 (hooly), v.13 (very sick), v.19 (round), v.23 (adieu), vv.25-26 (slowly, slowly), vv.30-31 (dead-bell)

Anastrophe: v.9 (rose she up), v.16 (were a spilling), v.22 (was with him dealing), v.25 (raise she up)

Alliteration: v.15: “better for me…shall never be”