The Ballad of Adam Henry

The Ballad consists of five stanzas. Each stanza is made up of four lines that follow the rhyme scheme AABB.

The title of the Ballad is simple and clear: it tells the reader the text is a composition written by Adam Henry. Adam is the young boy saved by the judgment of Fiona Maye, an High Court justice. The reader also knows that Fiona is the addressee of the ballad, that has been sent by post by Adam to Fiona.  

In addition the title may reveal that Adam is not only the writer but also the subject of the composition.

The ballad narrates Adam’s story, relying on metaphorical language. The narrator is a first person narrator: it means that Adam is telling his story. It’s significant to notice that he tells his story exploiting only the past tense, as if his life were already gone. Actually the reader doesn’t know anything about Adam’s situation at the moment of Fiona’s reading, therefore he could wonder why Adam has written using the past tense only.

The first stanza has the function to show Adam’s life before meeting Fiona. The religious reference to the wooden cross immediately inserts the reader into a metaphorical dimension. Indeed the wooden cross refers to Adam’s religious believes, to his devotion to God when he was a Jehovah’s Witness.

Words mostly belong to the semantic field of trouble and pain: cross, troubled, penitence, burdens. The semantic field of pain is connected to that of youth and foolishness: I was young and foolish, I’d been told. So, the first stanza communicates Adam’s lack of awareness when he was younger.

The second stanza deepens what the first one has just introduced. Adam underlines the pain he was feeling exploiting the image of the cross, whose splinters cut his shoulder. He was really almost dead, because of his leukemia. In strong opposition to Adam’s condition, the stream, metaphor of life, was happily dancing under the sunlight. But his devotion made him blind and he continued to follow the painful street of devotion. The expression with eyes fixed on the ground well communicates Adam’s firmness and determination: he was truly convinced of the correctness of his behavior.   

He was living following the rules he had been told when something happened. The third stanza has the function to introduce the event that radically changed his life.

A fish, metaphor of Fiona, suddenly rose out of the water. It was a beautiful fish with rainbows on its scales, surrounded by dancing pearls of water. Fiona’s entry in Adam’s life is here expressed as a wonderful and surprising event, a ray of sunshine into the darkness. The fish invites the boy to throw the cross in the water in order to become free, and the boy heeded the fish and drowned his load in the river. The image stands for Adam’s choice to abandon his religious faith, after remaining fascinated by Fiona’s apparition. Adam’s choice is the turning point of the ballad, but also of his life.  A clashing element is introduced at the end of the stanza: the shade of Judas tree, that suggests the idea of sin and insinuates a shadow of darkness.

The fourth stanza initially tells the wondrous consequences of Adam’s choice, exploiting the semantic field of happiness: wondrous state of bliss, sweetest kiss. But the state of beatitude disappears as suddenly as it came. The conjunction but clearly marks the contrast between the first and the second part of the ballad. Indeed she, pronoun referring to Fiona, dived again in the water and never appeared again. The image stands for Fiona’s refuse to Adam’s desire of living with her. As a consequence the boy fell again in a sorrowful state of mind.

In the last stanza, the connection to religion returns and prevails over the whole stanza. Jesus discloses that actually the fish was Satan, and since Adam heeded him now he must pay the fee. He must pay for the kiss of Judas he accepted, betraying Jesus. The semantic choices underline the idea of sin, whose images are Satan and Judas. The last stanza doesn’t leave any possibilities of interpretation: Adam has returned to his religious convictions, to the blind faith for God. What will be the consequences?

The ballad is not finished: the last line is missing. The reader can just imagine and make hypothesis about the end of Adam’s story, starting from a baleful clue: you must pay the fee.