Barbara Allan (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

In his collection of essays titled The Ballad As Song, Bertrand Harris Bronson lists “Barbara Allan” as one of the seven most popular ballads in the world. As he puts it, the popularity of this ballad and most of the others on his list stems from their presentations of “love as a disease from which no one recovers.” The popularity of “Barbara Allan” can also be traced back to the seventeenth century, in a comment in Samuel Pepys’s diary. Pepys admired the work’s conciseness, its tight narrative structure, and the way that the tragic story is told quickly and with a strong ending. He declared that this song has an “eternal appeal.... It is as if the essence of hundreds of romantic love stories had been distilled into this one ballad. The tantalizing lack of details adds an element of mystery to the tragic Tate.”

Attesting to the continued popularity of “Barbara Allan,” twentieth-century critic Christine A. Cartwright examines this ballad in her article “‘Barbara Allen’: Love and Death in an Anglo-American Narrative Folksong.” Cartwright discusses current versions of the ballad that exist in the United States, noting that the ballad’s theme, the tragedy of true love, appears in contemporary country-western music. In her analysis, she points out the existence of opposing forces in the poem’s symbols and in its literal meaning. Since love and death are the paradoxical themes of the ballad, Cartwright calls to her reader’s attention the parallel, opposing images of the green fields and the graveyard, and of the red rose and the thorny “brier.”