Analysis of ‘The Ballad Of Adam Henry’

The ballad is written by Adam, who has sent it to Fiona Maye.                                                

Considering the title the reader may think that the Ballad is about Adam Henry’s condition/life, and so that it is an autobiographic poem. Going on reading, his conjecture is confirmed: the whole ballad (made up of 5 stanzas of 4 lines each) seems to retrace Adam’s life in a symbolic way. Indeed Adam draws himself as a boy “almost dead”, who has to drag a wooden cross (that stands for his religion, that leads him to refuse the blood transfusion), and who reaches a “merry” stream (that stands for safety) where a fish “with rainbows on its scales” (that stands for Fiona) suggest him to throw the cross into the water (indeed, with her judgment, Fiona oblige Adam to take the blood transfusion); The fish also gives him a kiss, right before diving “to the icy bottom” (and so right before Fiona distances herself from the boy). In the last stanza there is Jesus who tell Adam that the fish “was the voice of Satan” and so that he has to “pay the fee” for his behavior.                                                                                                   

 The final words of the ballad “may he” leave the poem uncompleted, and allow for further elaborations: the reader may conjecture that, in some ways, Adam will pay his fee. Indeed at the end of the novel, the reader comes to know that Adam (again at the hospital for leukemia) has refused the blood transfusion and therefore he has died. So, considering the whole novel, the reader finds out that the ballad is a warning for Fiona and that it bring to surface Adam’s change of mind about Fiona and, more in general, about life.