APPENDIX
SUGGESTIONS
FOR TEACHERS AND LEADERS OF
POETRY HOURS
Primitive ballads have a straightforward felicity; many of them a conjuring melody as befits verse and music born together. Their gold is virgin, from the rock strata, and none the better for refining and burnishing. No language is richer in them than the English.
Edmund Clarence Stedman
The old song of Chevy-Chase is the favourite ballad of the Common People of England; and Ben Jonson used to say, he had rather have been the author of it than of all his works.... For my own part, I am so professed an admirer of this antiquated song, that I shall give my reader a critic upon it.
Joseph Addison
Ballads are living organisms.[1] If a teacher requires a pupil to analyze minutely a ballad according to rules of prosody and literary criticism, the analysis ruthlessly destroys its spontaneous folk-spirit. To dissect a ballad is literary slaughter.
We all know how the cold-blooded analysis of choice masterpieces destroys forever a pupil’s pleasure in reading them. The teacher of ballad-literature should use the opposite method to that of literary criticism. She should make her pupil delight in a ballad for its own sake; for its unity, its swinging rhythm, its unself-conscious expressions of emotion, and for the human life within it.
A ballad treated in this sympathetic manner will become a thrilling memory for the pupil to carry through the years. A ballad presented thus has educational values besides that of giving joy. It may be used to develop the pupil’s sense of time and rhythm; to enlarge his vocabulary; to teach him to express his thoughts without affectation; to give him ease in sight-reading of Scottish dialect and old English spelling and to accustom him to obsolete words. As a memory exercise for the pupil, the learning and recitation of ballads is unrivaled; because young people memorize them without effort. And furthermore, ballads have dramatic qualities that hold and move a mixed audience of boys and girls of all ages—and of grown folk, too, for that matter.
But perhaps the most important educational function of ballad-literature is that of being a safety-valve for the escape of new, fast-rising feelings and enthusiasms of growing boys and girls, feelings that throng and press for utterance. Young people do not know how to put them into their own words, but find a wholesome and satisfying means of expressing their emotions through learning and reciting ballads or by reading them aloud.