Bonny Barbara Allen - Textual analysis

Considering the title of the poem the intelligent reader can understand it is a ballad, a lyrical form of poetry, which uses figures of speech as incremental repetition and alliteration, to make the text memorable. The title in fact contains the alliteration of consonants "b" and "n".

The poem is made up of eight stanzas and every stanza contains four lines so they're called "quatrain". 

In the first three lines of the first quatrain, the narrator gives us information about the place and the time where the action takes place, and appoints the first protagonist of the story. The story takes place in the West country around the 10^th of November ("it was in and about the Martinmas time"), when green leaves fall from the trees. In this bleak atmosphere is presented the protagonist: Sir John Graeme. The poet immediately reveals us the social status of man putting the word "Sir" before his name.

In the last line of the same quatrain the poet gives us the first information about the story line: Sir John Graeme fell in love with a woman, Barbara Allen.

In the following quatrain there are two voices: the narrator's one, as in the previous stanza, and the voice Sir John's men. The noble sent his men “down throught the town”. The had to go to Barbara Allen's and tell her to hurry in getting there.

In this stanza the poet uses some expressions such as “haste” and “gin ye” that weren't used in common English. In this way, the language is used according to what the poem wants to communicate.

The second line of the second stanza is connected to the second one of the first stanza by the rhyme between the words “a-falling” and “dwelling”.

Even in the third quatrain the voices are two: in addition to the narrator's one, is inserted for the first time the Barbara Allen's one.

In the first three lines the narrator describes the slow incoming of Barbara Allen at the bedside of Sir John, while the woman intervenes only in the last line. She addresses to the noble these words: "Young man, I think you're dying," showing her indifference.

In the fourth stanza, the narrator reports Sir John's words, in the first couplet, and Barbara Allen's words, in the second one. After the woman's cold sentence of the previous quatrain, Sir John explains her that he's very sick saying “I'm sick, and very, very sick” and it's all because of her. This repetition highlights the man's situation, which is the climax of the whole ballad. Barbara still replies with detached words, saying “O the better for me you shall never be, Though your heart's blood were a spilling”.

Barbara doesn't move in front of Sir John's suffering, which is expressed by the words “blood”, “heart” and “spilling”.

Except for the brief speech of the interlocutor, which imposes a break, the whole fifth stanza consists of the words of Barbara Allen: she invites Sir John to remember when he was drinking in the tavern and slighted her. To describe the scene, the poet uses some dialectical forms to lower the language level to the people's one, such as “dinna ye mind” (don't you rememeber) and “ye made the healths gae round and round” (your head was turning, that means “you drunk a lot”).

In the following stanza the narrator's voice is combined with Sir John's one. He is fighting with death and he's greeting his friends and asking them to be kind to Barbara Allen. This underlines she's important for him, even if she had a detached attitude. In the second line of this quatrain there's the personification of the death and also this word forms another figure of speech, the anaphora, with “dealing”.

His aristocratic social status is highlighted by the repetition of the French word “Adieu”, that marks Sir John's speech from the dialectic expressions of Barbara Allen and Sir John's men.

In the seventh quatrain the poet plays on the repetition of the adverb “slowly”, which is synonymous of the word “hooly” used in the third stanza. To make the quatrain slower than the others, the poet puts lots of commas that impose pauses between a word and another. Barbara Allen leaves Sir John's room slowly, saying she could not stay with him until his death. There is also an allitteration of the sound "s" around the whole stanza.

The end of the poem is told by the narrator's voice: Barbara Allen “had not gane a mile but twa” (dialectical form) when she hears the dead-bell ringing because of John's death.

In this case, the poet plays on the personification of the bells, whose “jows” “cry'd, Woe to Barbara Allen”.

In the last line the poet condemns Barbara Allen to the pain beacause of her attitude towards the sweetheart man.

In the final analysis, the reader may note that the name "Barbara Allen" is repeated at the end of the last line of five stanzas; this rhetorical figure is called incremental repetition and its function is to tie stanzas together and to make the ballad easy to remember.