Ballades & Rhymes from Ballades in Blue China and Rhymes a la Mode

by Andrew Lang

Clement Marot, Dialogue de deux Amoureux.

“I love a ballad but even too well; if it be doleful matter, merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed, and sung lamentably.”

A Winter’s Tale, Act iv. sc. 3.

CONTENTS.

BALLADES IN BLUECHINA.
	PAGE
Ballade of Theocritus	[15]
Ballade of Cleopatra’s Needle	[17]
Ballade of Roulette	[19]
Ballade of Sleep	[21]
Ballade of the Midnight Forest	[24]
Ballade of the Tweed	[27]
Ballade of the Book-hunter	[29]
Ballade of the Voyage to Cythera	[31]
Ballade of the Summer Term	[34]
Ballade of the Muse	[36]
Ballade against the Jesuits	[38]
Ballade of Dead Cities	[40]
Ballade of the Royal Game of Golf	[42]
Double Ballade of Primitive Man	[44]
Ballade of Autumn	[47]
Ballade of True Wisdom	[49]
Ballade of Worldly Wealth	[51]
Ballade of Life	[53]
Ballade of Blue China	[55]
Ballade of Dead Ladies	[57]
Villon’s Ballade of Good Counsel	[59]
Ballade of the Bookworm	[61]
Valentine in form of Ballade	[63]
Ballade of Old Plays	[65]
Ballade of his Books	[67]
Ballade of the Dream	[69]
Ballade of the Southern Cross	[71]
Ballade of Aucassin	[73]
Ballade Amoureuse	[75]
Ballade of Queen Anne	[77]
Ballade of Blind Love	[79]
Ballade of his Choice of a Sepulchre	[81]
Dizain	[83]
VERSES ANDTRANSLATIONS.
A Portrait of 1783	[87]
The Moon’s Minion	[90]
In Ithaca	[92]
Homer	[93]
The Burial of Molière	[94]
Bion	[95]
Spring	[96]
Before the Snow	[97]
Villanelle	[98]
Natural Theology	[100]
The Odyssey	[102]
Ideal	[103]
The Fairy’s Gift	[105]
Benedetta Ramus	[107]
Partant pour la Scribie	[110]
St. Andrews Bay	[112]
Woman and the Weed	[114]
RHYMES À LAMODE
Ballade Dedicatory	[123]
The Fortunate Islands	[125]
Almae Matres	[139]
Desiderium	[143]
Rhymes à la Mode	[145]
Ballade of Middle Age	[147]
The Last Cast	[140]
Twilight	[153]
Ballade of Summer	[154]
Ballade of Christmas Ghosts	[156]
Love’s Easter	[158]
Ballade of the Girton Girl	[159]
Ronsard’s Grave	[161]
San Terenzo	[164]
Romance	[166]
Ballade of his own Country	[168]
Villanelle	[171]
Triolets after Moschus	[173]
Ballade of Cricket	[175]
The Last Maying	[177]
Homeric Unity	[181]
In Tintagel	[182]
Pisidicê	[184]
From the East to the West	[187]
Love the Vampire	[188]
Ballade of the Book-man’sParadise	[190]
Ballade of a Friar	[192]
Ballade of Neglected Merit	[194]
Ballade of Railway Novels	[196]
The Cloud Chorus	[198]
Ballade of Literary Fame	[201]
ΝήνεμοςΑἰών	[203]
Science	[205]
The Barbarous Bird-Gods	[207]
Man and the Ascidian	[212]
Ballade of the Primitive Jest	[215]
Cameos	[217]
Cameos	[217]
Helen on the Walls	[220]
The Isles of the Blessed	[221]
Death	[223]
Nysa	[224]
Colonus (I.)	[225]
,, (II.)	[226]
The Passing of Œdipous	[227]
The Taming of Tyro	[228]
To Artemis	[229]
Criticism of Life	[230]
Amaryllis	[231]
The Cannibal Zeus	[232]
Invocation of Isis	[234]
The Coming of Isis	[235]
The Spinet	[236]
Notes	[237]

INTRODUCTION

Thirty years have passed, like a watch in the night, since the earlier of the two sets of verses here reprinted, Ballades in Blue China, was published. At first there were but twenty-two Ballades; ten more were added later. They appeared in a little white vellum wrapper, with a little blue Chinese singer copied from a porcelain jar; and the frontispiece was a little design by an etcher now famous.

Thirty years ago blue china was a kind of fetish in some circles, æsthetic circles, of which the balladist was not a member.

The ballade was an old French form of verse, in France revived by Théodore de Banville, and restored to an England which had long forgotten the Middle Ages, by my friends Mr. Austin Dobson and Mr. Edmund Gosse. They, so far as I can trust my memory, were the first to reintroduce these pleasant old French nugae, while an anonymous author let loose upon the town a whole winged flock of ballades of amazing dexterity. This unknown balladist was Mr. Henley; perhaps he was the first Englishman who ever burst into a double ballade, and his translations of two of Villon’s ballades into modern thieves’ slang were marvels of dexterity. Mr. Swinburne wrote a serious ballade, but the form, I venture to think, is not ‘wholly serious,’ of its nature, in modern days; and he did not persevere. Nor did the taste for these trifles long endure. A good ballade is almost as rare as a good sonnet, but a middling ballade is almost as easily written as the majority of sonnets. Either form readily becomes mechanical, cheap and facile. I have heard Mr. George Meredith improvise a sonnet, a Petrarchian sonnet, obedient to the rules, without pen and paper. He spoke ‘and the numbers came’; he sonneted as easily as a living poet, in his Eton days, improvised Latin elegiacs and Greek hexameters.

The sonnet endures. Mr. Horace Hutchinson wrote somewhere: “When you have read a sonnet, you feel that though there does not seem to be much of it, you have done a good deal, as when you have eaten a cold hard-boiled egg.” Still people keep on writing sonnets, because the sonnet is wholly serious. In an English sonnet you cannot easily be flippant of pen. A few great poets have written immortal sonnets—among them are Milton, Wordsworth, and Keats. Thus the sonnet is a thing which every poet thinks it worth while to try at; like Felix Arvers, he may be made immortal by a single sonnet. Even I have written one too many! Every anthologist wants to anthologise it (The Odyssey); it never was a favourite of my own, though it had the honour to be kindly spoken of by Mr. Matthew Arnold.

On the other hand, no man since François Villon has been immortalised by a single ballade—Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?