I, Pitale-Sharu,[[786]]
Am arrived here,—
and in this song, leaning so hard on the event, so bare of statement, so woven in with the life of the actual day that lapse even of a year or so must have brought need to its hearers to be edified by the margent,[[787]] so dependent on the refrain, so suggestive of an accompanying dance and of gestures to make the little drama real, it is not unfair to say that one has at least some of those factors which went to make the beginnings of poetry.
The refrain has been considered as the main communal element in songs of labour; here are its functions in communal play, primarily a combination of consenting cries and movements in the festal dance. The song that always went with a dance got its name thence, and was called a ballad; and in the ballad, whether strictly taken as a narrative song, or as the purely lyrical outburst for which there is no better term than folksong, this consenting and cadenced series of words found its main refuge and record. The subject is complicated enough, and asks a volume to put it into any semblance of order; all that can be done here is to group the main facts in their relation to primitive poetry. Unless one holds fast to the idea that refrains represent the original choral song of the mass, one begins to explain them by their modern features, and thus, while accurate as to a certain stage of poetry, falls into error on the historic and genetic side. Ferdinand Wolf[[788]] gives an admirable account of the refrain, an admirable definition, but with a wrong inference of origins, when he assigns it to the participation of the people or of the congregation in songs which were sung to them by one or more persons on festal occasions, where the throng repeated in chorus single words, verses, whole strophes, or else in pauses of the main song answered the singer with a repeated shout to express their agreement, applause, horror, joy, or grief,—a shout which often lost its real meaning and became a mere conventional choral cry. Hence, says Wolf, it is clear that the refrain is as old as songs of the people.[[789]] It has been said that this statement is misleading in any genetic sense; it fails to note the growth of the exarch or foresinger into the poet, and to follow the backward curve of evolution to a point where the voice of the foresinger is lost in the voices of the choral throng itself, that raw material from which all poetry has been made. On the other hand, this definition undoubtedly states the facts of the refrain in its mediæval stage of survival from the chorus. In ballads, for example, it is the part taken by the throng in distinction from the part of the minstrel; but there is great difficulty in deciding how the throng actually sang the refrain. Names are no guide; and the terms, chorus, refrain, and burden are used in no exclusive fashion.[[790]] Probably one will not stray far from facts if one assumes that whenever a ballad came to be sung artistically, as a part-song in the rough, the refrain—hey-no-nonny, the wind and the rain, or what not—was really a burden, “the base, foot, or under-song”;[[791]] as is proved by the scene in Much Ado,[[792]] where no man is in the group to sing this base or foot, and Margaret, wishing a song to which they can dance, cries,—“Clap us into Light o’ Love; that goes without a burden: do you sing it, and I’ll dance it.” A passage quoted by many writers from the old play, The Longer thou Livest the more Foole thou art, tells how Moros enters, “synging the foote of many songes”; and bits of them follow, an interesting list; a little later, three of the characters are to “beare the foote,” and there is much testing of the key. On the other hand, in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair,[[793]] there is the same play of getting key and tune, and Cokes “sings the burden” with Nightingale; but this is simply a couplet recurring at the end of each stanza. So Guest[[794]] defines the burden as “the return of the same words at the close of each stave.” Is this right? For what one most wishes to know, so far as the singing of ballads is concerned, is whether the refrain, constant or intermittent, was sung as the “foot,” that is, contemporaneously with the regular lines, or after them, either as couplet or in alternation,—as in—[[795]]
It was a knight in Scotland borne,
Follow, my love, come over the strand,
Was taken prisoner and left forlorne
Even by the good Earle of Northumberland.
Here the fitness of things indicates intermittent singing of the refrain which thus makes a four-line stanza out of a two-line stanza; this is Rosenberg’s theory of the evolution of a ballad strophe.[[796]] Certainly the refrain came to be used in artistic and late communal poetry to mark off the stanza as the rime marked off the verse. What we now call a chorus, a recurrent stanza, sung after each new stanza, is often a clear case in ballads; for example, in The Twa Magicians,[[797]] that provocative and tuneful cadence of—
O bide, lady, bide,