Barbara Allan (Criticism)

Criticism

David Kelly

David Kelly is an instructor of creative writing at several community colleges in Illinois, as well as a fiction writer and playwright. In the following essay, Kelly explains that the role-playing that goes on in Barbara Allan’s relationship with Sir John Graeme is necessary in order for them to have a relationship at all.

The beauty of Barbara Allan’s story, the thing that makes it memorable, is that ultimately, outside of the sphere of life as we know it, she and John Graeme end up being true lovers, as indicated by the way the rose and brier that symbolize the two are intertwined forever more. The tragedy of Barbara Allan’s story is that she and he are unable to express their enduring love for each other while they are alive. Through the centuries, readers have come away from the poem with the simple message that someone who is cold in a love affair will live to regret it, a negative impression of Barbara Allan reinforced by the fact that she becomes, in a sense, a thorny, woody brier. It isn’t really fair, though, to think of her this way. The relationship described in this ballad is much more subtle and nuanced than the simplified understanding that sees her as a headstrong woman turning her back on a weakened, love-stricken man. It may not be an open or loving relationship that they have, but there are clear indications that the roles Barbara Allan and Sir John Graeme play are agreeable to both parties, and that it might be necessary for them to carry on these pretensions if they are to be together at all.

To gain a better appreciation of this ballad (or, really, of any story), readers need to give serious consideration to the differences between what the characters say and what they think. Barbara Allan’s insincerity is portrayed quite openly in this poem: she pretends to be uninterested in John Graeme’s fragile health, but that is a lie: later, when she hears the tolling of the bells, she is so overcome with grief that she knows it will mean the death of her. Some published versions have this ballad ending with stanza 9, after Barbara Allan announces her impending death, leaving out the “true love’s knot” that symbolizes their reunion. This serves to emphasize her regret for the way that she has treated him, but by leaving out this final symbolic act that balances the truth against their words and actions, it reduces this to a common story of misdirected flirtation. Their ultimate union tells us that theirs was a true love, and, therefore, that all of Barbara Allan’s cold behavior throughout the poem is a lie. Throughout the poem, she masks her feelings, but so does John Graeme, and we will have to consider why.

First, however, we should consider the evidence of Sir John’s own lack of sincerity. He does stay consistent with his word throughout the poem — in that their reunion in the afterlife does, in fact, match his claims of love — but, despite the sincerity of his feelings, his claims of love still ring false. For instance, why is he dying? He says in stanza 4 that he is sick for Barbara Allan. While it is true that in poetry emotional distress often manifests itself as physical illness (as it does for Barbara Allan in the end), we are not informed of any great emotional shock that is killing Sir John Graeme. He is deathly ill before her arrival at his sick bed, which seems to indicate two possibilities. He may have been rejected by Barbara Allan earlier, before the time covered by this poem, although it starts with him falling for her in the first stanza; but if she had previously rendered him a flat-out rejection strong enough to kill him, would she come when called for, or be so cheerful when she arrived? The more simple and likely explanation is that Sir John is bedridden with an actual physical ailment, but is attributing his illness to love in an attempt to romantically flatter her by describing the powerful hold she has over him.

The Sir John Graeme we see is a bit of a ham, prone to overstating his love and his sorrow. In the modern world, anyone who tried turning to the wall and groaning, “Adieu, adieu,” would be accused of the worst kind of overreacting; reading other ballads from the sixteenth century, one gets the impression that, even though they were in some ways more sentimental times, Sir John’s flamboyance would have been excessive even then. Readers have to reconcile the John Graeme who we see in the poem, who claims to be wasting away for love, with the one Barbara Allan describes, who has ignored her while drinking with his friends in the tavern. And just why would his realization of his love for her coincide with his dying? Perhaps he is overcome by fever. Perhaps, taking a final inventory of his life and separating the shallow from the meaningful, he can at last see Barbara Allan shine. The most likely answer, though — the one that does not require huge doses of “poetic license” to bend the laws of science or emotion — holds that Sir John’s love for Barbara Allan becomes no more or less superficial than it ever was, but that his exaggerated claims of love are part of the pattern they have established for their relationship, just as her forceful rejection of him conforms to her traditional role.

Looking at their relationship as an elaborate masquerade helps us appreciate the complexity of what they have together. John Graeme is not really dejected: “dejected” is just a part that he acts out.

Barbara Allan, likewise, is not as uncaring as she pretends to be, which could account for her ultimate grief, when she realizes that the game will not be going on for one more round. Contemporary readers are likely to frown upon such falsehood within a romantic relationship, feeling that these people are treating love less seriously than they should. We should consider, though, that role-playing offers Barbara Allan and John Graeme opportunities.

Writing in her book The Female Eunuch, feminist and social critic Germaine Greer explained unequal romantic relations this way: “Love is not possible between inferior and superior, because the base cannot free their love from selfish interest, as the desire either for security or social advantage, and, being lesser, they themselves cannot comprehend the faculties in the superior which are most worthy of love. The superior being on the other hand cannot demean himself by love for an inferior.” Greer was writing about different social levels assigned to men and women; the same dynamic would be even more intense between unequal parties in a feudal system. It is fair to assume, from the fact that Sir John has a title and a servant, and because Barbara Allan’s home is dismissed lightly as “that place where she was dwelling,” that they belong to different social classes, and, whatever the rules of their class system, this inequity needs to be corrected if they are to have any kind of a meaningful relationship. The roles they play with one another allow them to face each other as equals. As his title empowers him, so too does her callousness empower her; just as he can ignore her in the social setting of the tavern, she can ignore him in the intimacy of his sick room. It is not the healthiest of relationships, but it does create a sort of balance that is absent in bad romances. The problem, of course, is that this charade allows no place for Sir John Graeme or Barbara Allan to directly convey their true feelings. He has to be too sweet and she has to be too sour in order for them to meet in the middle.

When he dies, Barbara Allan is stunned to find herself frozen in the role that she was playing for her momentary advantage: that of the blithe uncaring vixen who laughed off the love that Sir John Graeme professed with his last breath. Like a loser in a game of hot potato or musical chairs, she finds herself isolated, with time having run out before she expected it; she is an isolated loser in a game that only she and the dead man knew they were playing. If one feels that she toyed with Sir John’s love, and that he was powerless under her control, it is difficult to not feel contempt for Barbara Allan. However, if one believes that she is a victim of circumstances who has lost her one true conspirator — as well as her one true love — then it is difficult not to feel pity for her. It is this range of possible interpretations that has allowed this ballad to endure throughout the generations, while others have fallen away. Everyone knows at least one couple like this, who can’t even agree about loving each other and who will go on arguing about their love until the very end.

Source: David Kelly, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

Carolyn Meyer

Carolyn Meyer holds a Ph.D. in modern British and Irish literature and has taught contemporary literature at several Canadian universities, including the University of Toronto. In the following essay, Meyer explains the timeless appeal of “Barbara Allan.”

No other traditional folk ballad has been so widely dispersed, so variously reinterpreted, nor so thoroughly acculturated as “Barbara Allan.” Number one atop Bertrand Bronson’s list of the most popular ballads, it exists in 98 recorded versions in West Virginia alone, and from its English and Scottish origins, it has migrated as far afield as the Caribbean, Canada, and Texas. Barbara, as the archetypal slighted mistress who is both agent and victim of love’s impetuosity and folly, is known worldwide under a range of pseudonyms and aliases, having been reinvented time and time again (and, according to John Minton in a Southern Folklore article, having even been masculinized as a love-struck African-American teenager named Boberick Allan). Her story has refused to disappear from the margins of modern consciousness and appeals to us today much as it did to eighteenth-century Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith, Norwegian composer Edvard Greig (who wrote a melody for its lyrics), and English diarist Samuel Pepys, who, in 1666, lauded the “perfect pleasure” he experienced on first hearing the “little Scotch song of Barbara Allan.” Even contemporary American novelist Joyce Carol Oates has confessed to being haunted by it, noting in her essay “‘In the Fifth Act’: the Art of the English and Scottish Traditional Ballads” that “If I am alone and I become aware of myself humming or singing under my breath, why is it likely to be ‘Barbara Allan’?” One answer to its eternal and universal appeal may lie in what critic Alan Bold has called “the masterly concision of its narrative,” for no sooner do its lovers meet than they are parted, and no sooner is love spurned than its loss is bitterly repented. Barbara and Sir John Graeme do not merely experience love in all its extremes and malformations, they literally give up their lives for it. This is an intense, uncommon and visceral passion — love on a grand scale in a short span — made more intense through the brevity of the ballad’s eleven stanzas. The volcanic force of its story line is further offset by the ballad idiom itself, with its incongruously sentimental commonplaces, stark simplicity, and childlike naivete. “Barbara Allan,” like the ballads Oates considers more generally in her essay, speaks with primitive authority to the deep recesses of the human imagination, becoming what she calls a “fantasy of the unconscious” where the impossible is presented “as if it were quite natural; as if, in fact, it belonged to the day-side and not the night-side of our existence.” Concise though the ballad may be, the timeless appeal of “Barbara Allan” also resides in its biting dramatic irony and in its distillation of supreme romantic tragedy. It survives not merely as song but as archetype — the essence of every Tate of love gone wrong ever told, a pre-blues blues song for all ages. Its echoes can be heard in everything from Henry James’s “Longstaff’s Marriage,” which appropriates and adapts its plot, to William Wyler’s 1939 adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which uses its melody as backdrop to Cathy and Heathcliff’s similarly themed story of frustrated love, destructive pride, and embitterment.

What mattered most to the illiterate and pre-literate folk responsible for ballad composition and transmission was the story itself, told with a sometimes mesmerizing and dream-like discontinuity, a disregard for character motivation, and a singsong repetitiousness that made the twists and turns of its plot easier to remember. No exception to the rule, “Barbara Allan” is written in the standard four-line

ballad stanza of alternating tetrameter and trimeter, with rhyme between the second and fourth lines. Most ballads begin, as Thomas Gray observed, “in the fifth act” — in medias res — just as the story reaches its climax. In this regard, the ballad form has much in common with the modern short story, which also begins near its climax and “often doubles back on itself in order to bring the reader into the emotional nexus of the story.” Less typical of the ballad norm, “Barbara Allan” in fact begins when the fifth act is over, “when the tragic actors have left the stage” and only a narrator remains “to give universal and objective meaning to what has happened.” The Tate, in this case, is told in the sparest of ways, making for a tantalizing lack of detail that adds an element of mystery. Few particulars of Barbara and Sir John’s courtship emerge, save that their romance is played out against the end of seasonal cycle — “about the Martinmas time / When the green leaves were a-falling” — a sure sign that their passions are to meet with an untimely end. So abridged is their rather one-sided relationship (for it is the unfortunate Sir John who is besotted), that it occupies barely a single stanza. Nevertheless, the plainness and factuality with which Sir John Graeme’s love for Barbara Allan is stated is characteristic of the earthiness of ballads in general and establishes the sexual motivation for the events that are about to unfold.

If sex and violence, in all of its tabloid-like sensationalism, are the chief mainstays of popular balladry, then a close second is the convention that sees the rich beset by misfortune and, sometimes quite literally, cut down to size. For the ballad folk, this was perhaps the only means to redress the imbalance that left them victims of their social betters. Sir John Graeme is clearly a wealthy landowner of some influence, important enough to have a “man,” most likely a chamberlain, do his bidding. As the action begins, Sir John’s “man” goes “down through the town” to fetch his master’s sweetheart, but the very necessity of his mission underlines the physical as well as the social distance between the two lovers. In English and Scottish Ballads, poet and ballad anthologist Robert Graves speculates that Barbara is no ordinary country lass, but in fact a witch who takes vengeful exception to her aristocratic lover’s decision to end their affair and marry a woman of higher social rank. Despite such supernatural overtones, what the ballad folk really derived from the story was the satisfaction of knowing that though Sir John may well be a fine young lord, his lands and riches cannot save him from the agony of lovesickness and heartbreak he suffers for the sake of a country girl.

Two standard ballad features — the deathbed scene and what Alan Bold, in The Ballad: The Critical Idiom, refers to as the “pining-away motif” — anchor the poem’s central stanzas (3-7). Though Barbara is willingly escorted to her estranged lover’s bedside, she both arrives and departs with an almost pathological slowness (“O hooly, hooly rose she up / ... O slowly, slowly raise she up”) and exhibits body language that not only reveals her unshakable resolve and self-possession, but also lends a strange, dream-like quality to their final encounter. On drawing her ex-lover’s bed curtain aside, she observes with stark unemotionalism, “‘Young man, I think you’re dying.’” Poor bedside manner to say the least, her bluntness explains why some versions go by the title “Barbara Allan’s Cruelty” and why she has sometimes been rechris-tened “Barbarous Ellen” and “Barbary Alone.” In the ensuing dialogue so typical of the ballad form, where dialogue accounts for the bulk of the narrative, Barbara’s pitilessness is shown to have been provoked — “When ye was in the tavern drinking, / ... ye made the healths go round and round, / And slighted Barbara Allan” — and it is for this crime of the heart that she is now exacting revenge.

Though ballads, as a whole, tend to offer observations of what Oates calls the “grotesque inequities between the lot of men and the lot of women,” “the singers had no wish to alter the ways of the world, because they had no grasp of the fairly modern idea that the ways of the world might be altered.” Modern readers might be tempted to see Barbara as a prototypical feminist, asserting her own will against patriarchal authority, or, at the very least, as the victim of a social double standard, maligned for having the audacity to give as good as she gets. The ballad folk, however, would have seen only the monstrous pride that prevented a woman from saving the man who, quite literally, loves her to death. “Bonny” Barbara Allan is thus one of the prime literary incarnations of the femme faTate figure: a bewitcher and enslaver of men, an embodiment of the fearful aspect of female sexual power, and a warning to those who would love unwisely or unwell. As Sir John nears death, Barbara seems blase, unmoved by his exhortations, even a little bored by the proceedings — “And sighing said, she could not stay.” In his final farewell, he instructs his friends to be “kind to Barbara Allan,” a generously forgiving gesture considering that she has sealed his fate by refusing to reciprocate his love on demand and reconcile with him. His ominous remark proves that he knows her all too well and can see through her injured pride, for in anticipating the effect his death will have on her, he is capable of seeing her pitilessness as pitiable.

The pivotal eighth stanza corresponds to the recognition scene in a tragedy, for it is here that Barbara realizes, too late, the consequences of her misdeeds. As the ballad moves precipitously toward its hasty conclusion, through a montage of scenes so typical of the genre, Barbara begins to make her way home from her interview with Sir John only to hear his death knell. Each successive ringing of the “dead-bell,” by means of repetition, captures her obsessive self-awareness, her all-too-powerful sense of guilt encapsulated in “‘Woe to Barbara Allan,’” a phrase that also conveys the disapproval and condemnation of the community at large. As Barbara goes home crying to her mother, her transformation from ruthlessly self-possessed woman to chastened and shame-ridden child seems complete. She takes to her bed not simply to mourn her lost love but to give up her life for him — a final reciprocal gesture in a relationship otherwise horribly out of sync. “Barbara Allan” thus upholds the convention that critic Alan Bold claims is almost “a sine qua non of romantic balladry, that if one lover dies the other must follow suit.”

With the death of the tragic actors, it falls to the narrator to step in and perform a role similar to that of the chorus in classical tragedy, which is, in Oates’s words, “to translate action into perception” in such a way as to “give universal objective meaning to what has happened.” The final vision is one in which human tragedy is put into perspective, outdistanced by what Oates calls “an ironic consciousness of the way the world is.” “Barbara Allan” is no exception to this rule. It ends with a sweetly sentimental rose-and-brier vignette — a motif used to conclude at least half a dozen other ballads by which lovers are forever joined in a “transcendent love-knot” that stands as a monument to their eternal love. Bitterness and sorrow having been laid to rest with the passing of the winter season, the natural order of things of which the lovers are a part is reasserted along with the seasonal renewal. Though the individual may perish, the flourish of the finale seems to suggest that nature endures. The ballad’s essentially tragic view of life, as enacted through the Tate of the doomed lovers, is ultimately subsumed within the restorative vision of the final stanzas. For all of its brevity and concision, “Barbara Allan” sets forth an expansive view of the realities and possibilities of love, or love, as Oates reflects, as “we might wish it to be.”

Source: Carolyn Meyer, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

What Do I Read Next?

• The definitive collection of ballads such as “Barbara Allan” is Francis James Childs’s collection The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. It was originally published by Houghton Mifflin in ten volumes between 1882 and 1898. In 1965, Dover Publications issued a condensed five-volume reprint.
• The poetry of the 1600s, when “Barbara Allan” was a popular song ballad, is collected in Signet Classic’s 1974 collection Poets of the 17th Century, edited by John Broadbent. Volume I is arranged by the major poets, while Volume II is organized around themes and historic events.
• Katharine Lee Bates compiled a one-volume collection called Ballad Book for publication in 1890. It divides traditional ballads into three categories: “Ballads of Superstition,” “Ballads of Tradition,” and “Romantic and Domestic Ballads,” with the last section including “Barbara Allan.” Books for Libraries Press reissued the book in 1969.
• The Viking Book of Folk Ballads of the English-speaking World was edited by Albert B. Friedman and published in 1956.
• MacEdward Leach’s 1955 collection, The Ballad Book, published by A. S. Barnes and Co., is interesting because it is cross-cultural, with selections from England, Scotland, and the United States.
• Birkinn Publications has issued a recent (1998) paperback by David Kerr Cameron, illustrated by Barbara Robertson, titled The Ballad and the Plough; A Portrait of the Life of the Old Scottish Farmtowns.