Emily Tang (495200093)
Ms. Jennifer Chiu
Introduction to literature(A)
Essay 1
Mar. 25, 2007
As a fantasy novels addict, I used to see several Ballads in the stories which were created by the authors to enrich the historical atmosphere. Including “Lord of the rings” and “Endless story”. Due to my affection toward fantasy novels, I was also hooked on ballads. The reason why I got hooked on it is that although ballad is not told in a romantic, complicated way, but it is kind of form combined with music. In my opinion, with the power of melody, the emotions of the content could be transmitted to listener more efficiently. To say in brief, as I had set my mind to be a good writer, the brief but powerful way of describing is something that worth me learning.
Let’s go back to the topic. Now I‘m going to make several comparisons between two ballads, “Edward” and “Sir Patrice Spence”.
The first comparison falls between the ways of revealing plots, instead of directly telling readers the scene where stories taken place, both authors of “Sir Patrice Spence” and “Edward” chose to reveal the plots in a more concealing way. First came “Sir Patrice Spence”. We could tell from the whole ballad that, mostly, at the beginning of each stanza comes a descriptive line of the character. For example, at the first line of first stanza we see ‘the king sits in Dumferling toune’, at the beginning of the next stanza we were informed the appearance of knight. To say in brief, in “Sir Patrice Spence”, in order to allow readers easily catch up with the transformation of the scenes, the author used third point of view to lead readers into the plots. However, speaking of “Edward”, the plot was revealed through a series of conversations, a conversation between Edward and his unnatural mother who was an accomplice with his son Edward but pretended to have nothing to do with her husband’s death. In this ballad, conversation plays an important part which reveal readers not only plots but the emotion of the characters.
The second difference falls between the arrangement of space sequence. In ballad “Sir Patrice Spence”, the scenes seemed to jump with the descriptive line at the beginning of each stanza. For example, we could tell from the lines that, the first two stanza was proceeded in the court by the appearance of ‘king’ and ‘knight’. And then the scene shifted immediately to the sea shore with the appearance of Sir Patrice Spence. In my opinion, the author made this arrangement just to meet his purpose of making contrasts. And obviously, the contrasts were used to indicate the miserable situation of Sir Patrice Spence. However, in ballad “Edward”, the scene is unclear but we could tell from the lines that the conversation between Edward and his mother was not disturbed from the start to the end. Due to the above-mentioned condition, we could suppose boldly that the conversation was proceeded under a steady environment, maybe in one of their rooms or etc. why shouldn’t the author of “Edward” make transformation of the scene just like what author of “Sir Patrice Spence” had done? As for as I’m concerned, it was because the conversation between Edward and his mother had contained enough information for readers to realize the whole content, in other words, the scene did not matters a lot.
Last but not least, compared with two ballads, I prefer “Edward”. Because unlike the descriptive lines I found in “Sur Patrice Spence”, there are only series of simple conversations composed of “Edward”. But the conversations had contained everything that the author of “Sir Patrice Spence” wasted one or two lines to describe. Also, every line of ballad “Edward” would be considered necessary. What’s more, I admired the arrangement of conversations in “Edward”, first came the sword of blood, then the death of his father. Reading this ballad just like reading a detective novel, not until the end did I realize that Edward’s mother is one of the accomplices. It arouse my appetite to read it, to figure out the truth behind the conversations.
(Total 692 words)
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