A few rather different but entertaining ballads

I like poems I can enjoy recited and sung, and which can be shared by a happy crowd of people. "Waltzing Mathilda" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee."

I'm not a very erudite scholar nor poet. I like poems I can enjoy recited and sung, and which can be shared by a happy crowd of people. One of ballads (1), known to be a favourite of Australians, is Waltzing Mathilda, whose refrain is light on the tongue and easy on the heart:

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong

Under the shade of a coolibah tree

And he sang as he watched and waited 'til his billy boiled

You'll come a-waltzing matilda with me


"Waltzing matilda, waltzing matilda,
You'll come a waltzing matilda with me!"
And he sang as he watched and waited 'til his billy boiled,
"You'll come a-waltzing matilda with me!"

...

Our ballad is has a simple rhyme scheme: abcb dbcb abdb abeb fbeb abab apparently composed too of dactylic tetrametre.To better understand these simple lyrics, one should know the meanings of swagman, 'waltzing mathilda,' billy, and billabong.

swagman--
A gentleman of the road, an itinerant roaming country roads, a drifter, a tramp, a hobo. Carried his few belongings slung in a cloth, which was called by a wide variety of names, including 'swag', 'shiralee' and 'bluey'. Given the large number of names for them, they must have been a pretty common sight.

billabong--
An originally aboriginal word for a section of still water adjacent to a river, cut off by a change in the watercourse, cf. an oxbow lake. In the Australian outback, a billabong generally retains water longer than the watercourse itself, so it may be the only water for miles around.

billy--
A tin can, maybe two litres (four pints) in capacity, usually with a wire handle attached to the top rim, in which 'swaggies' (and contemporary Australian campers) boil water to make tea (and to kill the beasties in the water they've taken out of the billabong).

coolibah tree (also coolabah)--
A particular kind of eucalyptus, eucalyptus microtheca, that grows beside billabongs. Roger Clarke records that a friend told him that the eucalyptus microtheca is a small to medium-sized tree to 20 metres, widespread in arid and semi-arid areas near watercourses and seasonally inundated areas in open woodlands, found in all states except Victoria and Tasmania.

waltzing matilda

Matilda was a mock-romantic word for a swag, and to waltz matilda was to hit the road with a swag on your back. Very few non-Australians seem to understand this, and hence regard the song as gibberish or cute, something like 'Jabberwocky' set to music. "'Twas brillig and the slithy toves ..." indeed.

The term is thought to come from a German expression. "Auf die Walz gehen" means to take to the road (as of apprentices in the Middle Ages, who were required by their Master to visit other Masters and report back, before they could secure their release. In some trades, at least in some parts of Germany and I believe Denmark, they still do). The dance, anglicised as 'waltz', came several centuries later). Matilda is a girl's name, applied to one's bed-roll. As a correspondent points out, this is a bit of a come-down for a name that originated as the Teutonic Mathilde - 'Mighty in Battle'.

The verses written by Banjo Patterson. You may notice that in each stanza, the third line of the refrain is the same as the third line of the preceding verse. Roger Clarke notes that the last two lines of the last verse are performed in a hushed tone, before bursting back into the jollity of the refrain."
However, I'm still researching who put the words to music. A study of Banjo Patterson's verse will almost inevitable lead to acquiring a working knowledge of Australian English dialect of the 19th century.

Another of my favourites is by the poet-balladeer of the Alaskan and Yukon gold rush, Robert Service. "The Cremation of Sam McGee" is a ballad commemorating every fool who went and lost his life in search of gold in the Far North. This poem, first published in 1907, had come to be loved by many throughout the world.
Ted Harrison helped transform this into a children's book with colorful illustrations in 1986. Last year, a 20th-anniversary edition has been released by Kids Can Press, with new cover art and heavy paper stock.

Daniel Pinkwater and Scott Simon did a wonderful audio review of this book on NPR in August of last year on NPR:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who toil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see

Was that night on the marge of Lake Laberge
I cremated Sam McGee.

abab cded is the rhyme scheme, with a rhythm of iambic tetrametre.


Incidentally, I enjoy reading about poets whom I've never heard before, or about whom I know very little. One of these is Joaquin Miller: I have read and re-read one of Joaquin Miller's poems, an epic about the American mercenary Walker, who briefly became dictator of Nicaragua. I have it in an old anthology by Harper's Magazine.
I find it notable that revolutionary poet Ernesto Cardenal of Nicaragua wrote some twenty years ago, in Spanish, a poem then tranlated into English by Jonathan Cohen as "With Walker in Nicaragua." (3)

(1) According to Wikipedia, a ballad is a story, usually a narrative or poem, in a song. Any story form may be told as a ballad, such as historical accounts or fairy tales in verse form. It usually has foreshortened, alternating four- and three-stress lines ('ballad meter') and simple repeating rhymes, often with a refrain.

(2)http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/WM/WMText.html

(3) http://www.uhmc.sunysb.edu/surgery/walker.html

Linkography:

http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/5345-A-B--Banjo-Paterson-Waltzing-Matilda


http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/3532-Robert-W-Service-The-Cremation-of-Sam-McGee

http://www.joaquinmiller.org/About/miller.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dactyl_(poetry)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iamb

Where you can study Australian literature and more: http://www.anu.edu.au/