Month: February 2018

Ballad Analysis · Blog Post · Folk Music · Lyrics and Chords · Poetry · Spirituality and Philosophy

The Stolen Rhyme

Daniel Kelly4 Comments

I have always loved the haunting ethereal beauty of Loreena McKennitt’s setting of William Butler Yeat’s poem, The Stolen Child, to music. I tried to practice singing the song before doing this recording for my YouTube channel, but even after 4-5 days I just couldn’t get the verses to flow.

This fired my curiosity, and so I looked a little deeper into the structure of the poem. For reference, here is the complete poem:

The Stolen Child – W.B. Yeats, 1886

    Where dips the rocky highland
    Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
    There lies a leafy island
    Where flapping herons wake
    The drowsy water rats;
    There we’ve hid our faery vats,
    Full of berry
    And of reddest stolen cherries.
    Come away, O human child!
    To the waters and the wild
    With a faery, hand in hand.
    For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

   Where the wave of moonlight glosses
    The dim grey sands with light,
    Far off by furthest Rosses
    We foot it all the night,
    Weaving olden dances
    Mingling hands and mingling glances
    Till the moon has taken flight;
    To and fro we leap
    And chase the frothy bubbles,
    While the world is full of troubles
    And is anxious in its sleep.
    Come away, O human child!
    To the waters and the wild
    With a faery, hand in hand,
    For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

   Where the wandering water gushes
    From the hills above Glen-Car,
    In pools among the rushes
    That scarce could bathe a star,
    We seek for slumbering trout
    And whispering in their ears
    Give them unquiet dreams;
    Leaning softly out
    From ferns that drop their tears
    Over the young streams.
    Come away, O human child!
    To the waters and the wild
    With a faery, hand in hand,
    For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

    Away with us he’s going,
    The solemn-eyed:
    He’ll hear no more the lowing
    Of the calves on the warm hillside
    Or the kettle on the hob
    Sing peace into his breast,
    Or see the brown mice bob
    Round and round the oatmeal chest.
    For he comes, the human child,
    To the waters and the wild
    With a faery, hand in hand,
    For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.

I realised that what was causing me the problem is that the length of verse and rhyming pattern within the last lines of each verse is not consistent. Note the rhyming structure in the first verse:

Where dips the rocky highland, Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island, Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats; There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berry, And of reddest stolen cherries.
 

Yet in the next stanza we have:

Where the wave of moonlight glosses, The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses, We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances, Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight; To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles, While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.

There are an extra three half-lines, and their rhyming doesn’t fit the model. Verse three is similarly muddled, yet verse four goes back to the structure of the first verse.

As a ballad singer, I am acutely conscious of the way that repetition in metre and rhyme makes it much easier to memorise and perform songs. I imagine that William B. Yeats would have been very familiar with the work of the Irish Bards and the use of this style of verse.

It could just be that this poem is intended to be read, not sung, and the discontinuity was intended as part of the work. However, the confusion goes beyond just the rhyme structure. The third verse is about gushing water, which seems to align with the ‘frothy bubbles’ in verse two. This phrase appears to be out of place in verse two, which is about pagan dances in the moonlight.

Yeats purists will probably chide me, but in my ballad version I have restructured the verses so that they are all four line stanzas with a repeated rhyming structure. So verses two and three become:

Where the wave of moonlight glosses the dim grey sands with light
By far off furthest rosses we foot it all the night
Weaving olden dances, mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight To and fro we leap

Where the wandering water gushes from the hills above Glen-Car         
In pools among the rushes that scarce could bathe a star            
We seek for slumbering trout, leaning softly out 
Hoping to find Fintan, knowledge for to gain

From ferns that drop their tears, over the young streams
And whisper in their ears, giving them unquiet dreams
And stir the frothy bubbles, whilst the world is full of troubles
Eyes blind but open, and anxious in their sleep.

The bold lines are my own additions. As students of Irish mythology will know, Fintan is the Salmon of Knowledge. I immediately thought of this on first reading of the verse about tickling trout. I have moved the ‘frothy bubbles’ to the line about streams. Interestingly, there was a note with the published version of this poem, indicating that there is a place in The Rosses where those who lay down to sleep may have their souls stolen by the fairies.

This site has a beautiful photo of the waterfall at Glen-Car. It is definitely the type of place in which one could imagine the fairy folk coming to visit. Yeats would have visited this site in his childhood.

On this lovely site there is a story about using the starlight reflected in forests pools to create powerful wands.

A review of the huge tome of work that Yeats has left us here, will show that he was both very well read and from his work A Vision, he was no stranger to the mystic arts. I wonder what other messages he hid in this and other works.

Ballad Analysis

William’s Razor – Yass History

Daniel Kelly3 Comments
Razor – Yass Museum

As a lover of ballads it is always exciting when you can pair a particular place and time with a ballad that has been circulating for 100 years or more. I had been singing Mary from Dungloe for many years without realising that Mary was a real person, who had left Ireland for New Zealand just as my ancestors had in the 1800s.

In this particular instance the reverse has occurred. I was inspired to write this ballad after reading the story in a local newspaper from 9th January 1864. The full story is available here, which is actually a re-print of the story in the Melbourne Leader. The original story from the Yass Courier was syndicated all over the country (maybe even back to England).

To summarise,  William Williams, a plasterer who had only been in the town of Yass for ‘some months’, attempted to kill a seventeen year old girl and, failing this, attempted to cut his own throat. The incident was triggered, it seems, by the refusal or postponement of a marriage proposal. To me, this story had all the required components for a great folk ballad, and knowing the incident had occurred less than 1 kilometre from our house, along the river which we walk by every few days, made it all the more fascinating.

As a person who likes a puzzle, I was also intrigued to learn the identity of the young girl and the final fate of William William’s.

The area around Yass was first settled in 1830 and the town itself was gazetted in 1837. In 1848 there were 55 houses and 274 people living in the town. The Australian Handbook, printed in 1888, indicates that the population had risen to 2370 by that time. In any case, there cannot have been more than a handful of 17 year old girls in the town in 1846.

The following clues are found in the primary article about the incident:

  • On Sunday (3 Jan) William and the girl walked by the Yass River, where on discussion about the postponement of the engagement, William produces a razor and threatens to harm himself. The girl grabs the razor from him and throws it in the river.
  • On Monday (4 Jan) the two talk at the girl’s married sister’s house. William leaves to go to his lodging at a nearby public house.
  • The girl retires in a room at the back of her sister’s house which has a half-glass door. William comes to her room after she is asleep, claiming he cannot get into his room at the public house. She refuses entry but gives him a blanket and key to the kitchen (a detached building).
  • William leaves (in his work clothes), towards the river, saying he will drown himself.
  • William returns when the girl and her sister have gone back to sleep in his Sunday clothes with a new razor. He breaks into the room, wakening the girl.
  • William says he has come to murder her first and then kill himself.
  • The girl screams for her sister, who is in a parallel bedroom.
  • William grabs her by the neck, with the razor in his other hand.
  • The girl’s sister opens the door to the parlour and she twists free.
  • The girl’s sister flees through the front door to fetch their father who lives across the road.
  • The girl flees into the parlour and gets to the other side of a large table.
  • William cuts his own throat (evidently missing the carotid arteries) and bleeds all over the kitchen.
  • The girl runs into the street.
  • The girl’s sister and father re-enter the house to find William lying on the girl’s bed, still bleeding profusely.
  • Sub-inspector Brennan and Constable Smith arrive in a few seconds.
  • Dr O’Connor is sent for and eventually sutures the wound after a struggle.
  • After hospitalisation, Williams claims to have left a sum of £70 or £80 pounds hidden under a stone by the Yass Bridge.

Initial Deductions

Yass – Town Map, 1898

The Yass Police residence has always been on Rossi Street, next to the Court House. The Rose Inn was built by Isaac Moses in 1837 on Comur Street (also next to the Court House) and is situated between the River and the houses on Rossi Street. The only places close to the Police Station, where there could be two residences across the road from each other would be 3-4 blocks within the intersection of Rossi and Dutton Streets.

It could be concluded that William Williams was staying at the Rose Inn, and that the girl and her sister were staying in a house on Rossi or Dutton Street.

I went through genealogy pages to look for girls who were born in Yass in 1845 or 1846 (would have been 17 in 1864) and cross referenced them with the property owners on Dutton and Rossi Street in 1898.

The only name that stands out is Margaret Carter, born 1846 to Eliza Bowra and James Carter. James was a policeman and owned a property on Rossi Street. Margaret had a sister, Sarah, born in 1843. It is a stretch, but Benjamin Warton, husband of Sarah Warton passed away in 1915 and there is a W. Warton property across the road from the Carter residence in Rossi Street.

House now on Rossi Street.

I have lived in this town for over ten years, but hadn’t visited the Yass and District Museum. On the weekend I went there to look at some of the paintings and pictures of the town in the 1800s and also look at the build dates of various key buildings in the town. I was also able to take a photo of a razor from the period.

Conclusion

I still need to visit the local archives to make 100% sure, but I am reasonably confident that if any 17 year old girl of Yass in 1864 was going to have the presence of mind to wrestle a razor from a bigger, stronger, man, it is likely to be the daughter of a local policeman, Margaret Carter.

I haven’t been able to track down what happened to her afterwards with any certainty, but now with a name and a birth date, I think it should be possible.