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Perhaps the best thing about the whole is the pathos of the last stanza:
We were nane ower mony to sleep, my dear,
I wot we were but three;
And never a bed in the weary world
For my bairn and my dear and me, my love,
For my bairn and my dear and me.
The ballad influence is strongly shown in the song from Mary Stuart "And ye maun braid your yellow hair." The language is that of the ballads, and the stanza is the ballad-stanza lengthened by two lines—a form often used in the ballads. There is more than a hint in it of a sad story, and a reminiscence of the opening stanzas of The Weary Wedding. It seems most like a snatch of a ballad.
The Ballad of Dead Men's Bay has very little to do with the traditional ballads, but here and there the language is borrowed from them. Especially is this true of the opening stanza:
The seas wings owre the slants of sand,
All white with winds that drive;
The sea swirls up to the still dim strand,
Where nae man comes alive.
But this is not at all consistently followed out. For instance, in the sixth Stanza, Swinburne has
For as day's waesome span,
but in the very next stanza he writes "woe" instead of "wae," because it chances to suit the rime. In subject-matter, this mystical piece has no relationship to the ballads.
II
We come now to what is perhaps, the hardest part of this study, the discussion of the ballads published in the Posthumous Poems. These eleven poems were placed first by the editors, Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise, and form, in bulk, rather more than a third of the whole volume. They were found "among MSS. of the years 1862 and 1863 . . . With them were found several of the ballads published at last in the Third Series of Poems and Ballads (1889) but provisionally set up in type in 1877."