GFerro- Bonny Barbara Allen (Martinmas)

BONNY BARBARA ALLEN (done in class)

The title focuses the attention of the reader on a proper name: the one of a girl. It also relies on alliteration of the sound “b” (“Bonny Barbara”).

The reader may be curious to find out why the poet decided to write a ballad about the young girl.

     Considering the layout the intelligent reader realizes the poem is arranged into 8 stanzas of 4 lines each, that is 8 quatrains. From the analysis he or she can realize that the name Barbara Allen is repeated 5 times and therefore he/she may now realize that not only Barbara Allen is the focus of the text but that she is also present repeatedly like a refrain. In addition, the reader notices that line 2 and line 4 rhyme and therefore he may expect repetition is a significant feature of the poem that recalls features of a song.

     The ballad is set in autumn and tells about Sir John’s love for Barbara Allen, a young lady living in the countryside. He is going to die and he wants to meet the girl one last time and that is why he sent his men to ask Barbara to go and visit him. The lady is reluctant to go but she accepts to see him at last. Unfortunately she tells him that his death would be better for her. She reminds him of a dinner they had together when he drunk so much and he most probably poisoned. His head he said was going round and round. It doesn’t take long for him to die and therefore he greets all his friends and asks them to be kind to Barbara Allen. As soon as he left the world Barbara started to realize/to be aware that she was sad for his death. The tragic atmosphere is highlighted by the death-bell of the town where Sir John used to live. The bell itself seemed to cry Sir Jon’s love for Barbara Allen.

     A connotative analysis of the level of sound displays the poet has resorted to frequent sound devices to make the text memorable and to focus on the tragic atmosphere of the story. He managed to get this effect by means of a frequent use of refrain: “Barbara Allen” is repeated over and over again so that the listener or the dancer cannot forget that the protagonist of the text and the reaper of Sir John’s love is a young girl who has also the symbolic name of Barbara. The name becomes symbolic because it’s the reason why the aristocratic man of the town is on point of dying: Barbara is not only “Barbara”; she is also “Bonny”. The informed reader indeed knows that “bonny” means both beautiful and nice looking and vigorous and strength and to tell the truth Barbara will survive even if she will eventually suffer, while Sir John despite of all his possibilities being he among all other things an aristocrat.

     This explains for the ballad to be a tragic love story. It conforms to all the conventions of the Middle Ages both and the social and cultural level and on the literary level. According to the social standards of the time, it was always women the ones who were cruel and guilty if they didn’t follow men’s expectations. Indeed during the Middle Ages and even later as well you can find no literary works which deal with women’s tragic pain.

     If you consider the level of the ballad you can easily realize it is written in very simply language so that the common people may understand it, the ballad also employs/displays the use of dialect and the Scottish dialect to be more precise. The tragic love story it deals with is set in Autumn, at “Martinmas time”. The choice of using the expression “Martinmas time” returns the reader the idea of the importance of the religious code in the cycles of nature. In order to create the settings and with the aim of introducing the characters the narrator provides the reader with just a few sketches that are anyway enough to suggest the scene and the situation. You can understand that if you consider that the “Martinmas time” (line 1) and “when the green leaves were a-falling” (line 2) suffice to create the seasonal background. As for the characters the narrator adopts the same style: one of the protagonists is simply “Sir John Graeme in the west countryside”.

The ballad starts in a way similar to a fable, thus drowning immediately the attention of the reader. Indeed “it was in and about” (line 1) reminds the conventional “Once upon a time”. The idea to use a simple language to reach the audience is functional to create a mind picture of the story told. Consider for example the following lexical icons “country” (v. 3), “town” (v. 5) and “place” (v. 6/10). They’re all together word easy to remember and very clear in the mind of the listeners.

There is no decrypting intent in the text: what matters is the story and therefore narration and situation. What the composer is looking for is to allow the listeners of the ballad to create a very clear idea of what is going on in society and to be more precise the society of the time where there was a rigid and clear-cut division in social classes. If it weren’t so, there mustn’t be any need for the narrator to use Barbara’s words to refer to a character that is only sketched. In the same way the listener comes across Barbara Allen, who is not simply Barbara.