Late Victorian ballads

Traditional themes appear later in the 19^th century in ballads written by another romantically-minded Scotsman, Robert Louis Stevenson. One of those is about the ancient folk of Scotland, the Picts, who were destroyed by the Scots who invaded from Ireland. Heather Ale is the title. The ballad is well-known to Russian readers due to a wonderful translation by Samuel Marshak.

From the bonny bells of heather

They brewed a drink long syne,

Was sweeter far than honey,

Was stronger far than wine…

Bold balladry also came handy when the author needed a stronger colouring to his poetic work. The great bard of the British Empire, Rudyard Kipling, resorted to balladry for many reasons. He needed an expressive form to convey his message, the sympathy with the soldiers who fought the frontier wars; the responsibility of the white man to his brothers who, despite difference of colour and creed, acknowledge the same Queen; the value of an Empire as the creator of a new, rich civilization.

R. Kipling’s reputation as a poet has always been precarious among the intellectuals in his home country. They have looked askance at his mixture of soldier’s slang and biblical idiom, his jaunty rhythms and open-air subjects, his outlandish Ladies (1892) being a winning example.

I’ve taken my fun where I’ve found it;

I’ve rogued an’ I’ve ranged in my time

I’ve ‘ad my pickin’ o’ sweethearts,

An ‘four o’ the lot was prime.

One was a ‘arf-caste widow,

One was a woman at Prome,

One was the wife of a jemador-sais,

An‘ one is a girl at ’ome.

Now I aren’t no ‘and with the ladies,

For, takin’ ‘em all along,

You never can say till you’ve tried ‘em,

An’ then you are like to be wrong.

Yet Kipling’s poetry attracts us; he has a gift of stating the obvious for the man in the street. He had a vigour and occasional vulgarity that were nothing less than a bomb exploding in the stagnating late Victorian literary world.In fact, many of his ballads had such an effect. No exception was one of Kipling’s most famous ballads, The Recessional, commemorating Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrated in 1897 (Text 15).