The Beginnings of Poetry
by Louise Pound
PMLA, Vol. 32, No. 2 (1917), pp. 201-232
VIII -THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY
I
Certain [Indian] societies require that each member have a special song; this song is generally of the man's own composition, although sometimes these songs are inherited from a father or a near relative
who when living had been a member of the society. These individual
songs are distinct from songs used in the ceremonies and regarded
as the property of the society, although the members are entitled to
sing them on certain occasions. When this society holds its formal
meetings a part of the closing exercises consists of the simultaneous
singing by all the members present of their individual songs. The
result is most distressing to a listener, but there are no listeners
unless by chance an outsider is present, for each singer is absorbed
in voicing his own special song which is strictly his own personal
affair, so that he pays no attention to his neighbour, consequently
the pandemonium to which he contributes does not exist for him.
The foregoing paragraph from Miss Alice C. Fletcher's account of Indian music [1] reads like a travesty of the accepted
view of primitive song, its character and authorship.
There is the familiar primitive "horde," engaged
in festal singing, without onlookers. Yet instead of collaborative
composition, improvisation, and communal
ownership of the ensuing "ballad," we have individual
authorship and ownership, and individual singing. This
is the testimony of a specialist who has spent many years
among the people of whom she writes, studying and recording
their songs and their modes of composition. Easily
recognizable is the homogeneous primitive group, singing
in festal ceremony; but this group does not conduct itself
in the way which literary historians have insisted that we
should expect.
The songs of primitive peoples have received much attention
in recent years, especially the songs of the American
Indians. An immense amount of material has been
collected and made available; and this has been done in
a scientific way, with the help of countless phonographic
and other records. Instead of having to rely on the stray
testimonies of travellers, explorers, historians, and essayists,
the student of primitive poetry has now at his disposal
an amount of data unavailable to his predecessors. He
need not linger among the fascinating mysteries of romantic
hypotheses, but can supply himself with the carefully
observed facts of scientific record.[2]
202
THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY
In this matter it cannot be valid to object that we should
not look among North or South American Indians, or Eskimos
for " beginnings." It cannot reasonably be said that
these tribes are too advanced, too highly civilized, to afford
trustworthy evidence as to aboriginal modes. As a matter
of fact, we can go little farther back, in the analysis of culture,
than these peoples, if we are to stay by what can be
demonstrated. When we have learned what we can learn
from the primitive tribes on our own continent, in South
America, Africa, Australia, Oceania, we know pretty much
all that we can surely know. If we go to the prehistoric,
we are conjecturing, and we ought to label our statements
" conjecture." In general, gradations of " primitiveness "
among savage peoples are difficult to make. A social group
may show the simplest or least organized social structure,
and yet be relatively advanced in musical and artistic
talent. Another group may show advance in social organization,
yet be backward in song and story. And certainly
even the most advanced of the Indian communities
(with the exception of civilized Mexico and Peru) are
every whit as primitive as the mediaeval peasant communes,
from whose supposed ways we are constantly asked
to learn as regards poetic beginnings.3 If, as we are told,
prehistoric song-modes are reflected in the folk-dances and
festal throngs of mediaeval peasants and villagers, or in
the singing of nineteenth-century Corsican field laborers,
Styrian threshers, Gascon vintage choruses, Italian country-
folk, Silesian peasants, Faroe Island fishermen, and
harvest-field songs everywhere,4 they ought to be reflected
yet more in the song-modes of the American Indians.
3 See F. B. Gummere, The Beginnings of Poetry, 1901, and The Popular
Ballad, 1907.
4Ibid.
203
LOUISE POUND
II
COMMUNAL " AUTHORSHIP AND OWNERSHIP
At the present time the accepted or orthodox view, i. e.,
among literary critics, hardly among anthropologists, concerning
the authorship of primitive song and the " beginnings
of poetry" is reflected in such passages as the following,
from a recent work by Professor Richard Green
Moulton: 5
The primary element of literary form is the ballad dance. This
is the union of verse with musical accompaniment and dancing; the
dancing being, not exactly what the words suggest to modern ears,
but the imitative and suggestive action of which an orator's gestures
are the nearest survival. Literature, where it first appears spontaneously,
takes this form: a theme or story is at once versified,
accompanied with music, and suggested in action. When the Israelites
triumphed at the Red Sea, Miriam " took a timbrel in her hands;
and all the women went out after her with timbrels and dances."
This was a ballad dance; it was a more elaborate example of the same
when David, at the inauguration of Jerusalem, "danced before the
Lord with all his might." And writers who deal with literary origins
offer abundant illustrations of folk-dances among the most diverse
peoples in an early stage of civilization.
In this passage and in his diagrams showing literary
evolution 6 Professor Moulton gives the " ballad dance"
the initial position in the chronology of musical and literary
history, characterizing it as the "primitive literary
form "-the ballad dance, moreover, according to the usual
view, of the throng. Individual composition of and priprietorship
in song is of secondary development; and when
this stage has been reached, "folk-song" has passed into
" artistry."
Better, let some passages from Professor Gummere's
5 The Modern Study of Literature, Chicago, 1915. From Chapter I,
"The Elements of Literary Form."
6 Ibid., pp. 18, 26.
204
THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY
The Beginnings of Poetry be cited. Professor Gummere
is our leading scholar of the subject, and in view of his
learning, his immense bibliographical equipment, and his
years of attention to the matter, his words may well have
especial weight. Here are some characteristic sentences:
" Poetry begins with the impersonal, with communal emotion."
7 " The ballad is a song made in the dance, and so
by the dance. . . The communal dance is the real source of
the song." 8 " The earliest ' muse' was the rhythm of the
throng."
9 " Festal throngs, not a poet's solitude, are the
birthplace of poetry." 10 ( Overwhelming evidence shows
all primitive poetical expression of emotion to have been
collective." 11 Let two quotations of greater length be
given:
As the savage laureate slips from the singing, dancing crowd, which
turns audience for the nonce, and gives his short improvisation, only
to yield to the refrain of the chorus, so the actual habit of individual
composition and performance has sprung from the choral composition
and performance. The improvisations and the recitative are
short deviations from the main road, beginnings of artistry, which
will one day become journeys of the solitary singer over pathless hills
of song, those " wanderings of thought" which Sophocles has noted;
and the curve of evolution in the artist's course can show how rapidly
and how far this progress has been made. But the relation must not
be reversed; and if any fact seems established for primitive life, it is
the precedence of choral song and dance ....
Here it is enough to show that rhythmical verse came directly from
choral song, and that neither the choral song, nor any regular song,
could have come from the recitative.12
It is natural for one person to speak, or even to sing, and for
ninety-nine persons to listen. It is also natural for a hundred per-
7The Beginnings of Poetry (1901), p. 139. Later, by Professor
Gummere, are The Popular Ballad (1907), and the chapter on Ballads
in the Cambridge History of English Literature (1908); but
these deal primarily with the English and Scottish ballads, not with
the origins of poetry.
8P. 321. 10P. 212. 1P. 93.
9P. 106. 1P. 13.
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LOUISE POUND
sons, under strong emotion, to shout, sing, dance, in concert and as
a throng, not as a matter of active and passive, of give and take,
but in common consent of expression. The second situation ...
must have preceded.13
To come farther down in the history of song, a favorite
picture with Professor Gummere is of European peasant
folk in the Middle Ages, improvising " ballads " in song
and dance, and thus-by virtue of the simple homogeneous
character of their life-establishing a type of balladry
superior to, and having more vitality than, anything of
the kind having its origin in individual authorship. It is
3 Pp. 80, 81. In Professor Gummere's article on " The Ballad and
Communal Poetry," Child Memorial volume (Harvard Studies and
Notes, etc., 1896), he says: " Spontaneous composition in a dancing
multitude-all singing, all dancing, and all able on occasion to improvise-
is a fact of primitive poetry about which we may be as
certain as such questions allow us to be certain. Behind individuals
stands the human horde. . . . An insistent echo of this throng . . .
greets us from the ballads." He adds communal poetry to Wundt's
( Ueber Ziele und Wege der Volkerpsychologie) three products of the
communal mind,-speech, myth, and custom. "Universality of the
poetic gift among inferior races, spontaneity or improvisation under
communal conditions, the history of refrain and chorus, the early
relation of narrative songs to the dance" [the italics are mine] are
facts so well established that "it is no absurdity to insist on the
origin of poetry under communal and not under artistic conditions."
More difficulty lies in "the assertion of simultaneous composition.
Yet this difficulty is more apparent than real."
Grosse, Anfainge der Kunst (1894), ch. ix, finds the poetry of
primitive peoples to be egoistic in inspiration, and gives examples of
lyrics of various types which point to this. " Im Allgemeinen
tragt die Lyrik der Jaigervilker einen durchaus egoistischen Charakter.
Der Dichter besingt seine personlichen Leiden und Freuden;
das Schicksal seiner Mitmenschen entlockt ihm nur selten einen Ton."
For Professor Gummere's discussion and rejection of Grosse's view,
see The Beginntings of Poetry, pp. 381 if.
For a present-day German view of primitive poetry, see Erich
Schmidt, "Die Anfange der Literatur," Die Kultur der Gegenwart,
Leipzig, 1906, I, pp. 1-27. For a French view, see A. van Gennep,
La Formation des L4gendes, Paris, 1910, pp. 210-211.
206
THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY
a long gap, that between aboriginal song and dance and
the English and Scottish ballads of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries; yet it is a gap we are asked to bridge.
Undoubtedly, if that " most ancient of creative processes,"
the communal throng chorally creating its song from the
festal dance, existed among the mediaeval peasants and
produced work of the high value of the English and Scottish
ballads, the same "ancient method " should prevail
among that yet more primitive people, the American
Indians.
That it is an absurd chronology which assumes that individuals
have choral utterance before they are lyrically
articulate as individuals, seems-extraordinarily enoughto
have troubled very few. Did primitive man sing, dance,
and compose in a throng, while he was yet unable to do so
as an individual ? We are asked to believe this. Are we to
assume that he was inarticulate and without creative gift
till suddenly he participated in some festal celebration and
these gifts became his ? Professor Gummere cites as evidence,
so important as to deserve italics, Dr. Paul Ehrenreich's
statement concerning the Botocudos of South
America, " They never sing without dancing, never dance
without singing, and have but one word to express bothr
song and dance." 14 Much the same thing, save as regards
limitations of vocabulary, might have been said by a traveller
among the ancient Greeks, with whom dance was
generally inseparable from music and verse. Nothing is
proved by this characteristic of the Botocudos, if it is a
characteristic; any more than anything is proved by the
fact that the far more aboriginal Akkas of South Africa 15
14 Ueber die Botocuden, Zeitschrift fiir Ethnologie, xix, pp. 30 ff.
Quoted in The Beginnings of Poetry, p. 95. See note 40 infra.
u Some- references for the Akkas are G. Burrows, On the Natives of
the Upper Welle District of the Belgian Congo, Journal of the
207
LOUISE POUND
have songless dances, or by the fact that danceless songsa
circumstance hard to fit into the accepted view of primitive
poetry-have been reported among the Andamanese,
the Australians, the MIaori of New Zealand, Semang
of Malaysia, Seri of Mexico, and Eskimo of the Arctic,
as well as among practically all North American tribes
that have been studied in detail.16 Surely the individual
does everything he can do, or chooses to do, as
an individual, before, or contemporary with, his ability
to do the same as a member of a throng. The testimonies
of travellers as to communal singing and dancing
Anthropological Institute (1889), xxvIII; Sir H. James, Geographical
Journal, xvII, p. 40, 1906; G. A. Schweinfurth, Heart of Africa,
N. Y., 1874, vol. II; H. von Wissmann, Meine Zweite Durchquerung
Aequaotorial-Afrikas, Frankfort, 1890; H. M. Stanley, In Darkest
Africa, N. Y., 1891; H. Schlichter, Pygmy Tribes of Africa, Scot.
Geog. Mag., viii, etc.
18 According to the testimony of Miss Fletcher, in a letter to the
present writer, there are many songs sung by Indian societies in
which there is no dancing. Such songs are spoken of as "Rest
Songs." In the account quoted at the opening of this paper, of the
simultaneous singing of individual songs by the members of a certain
society as the closing act of a meeting, the members are sitting
as they sing. Their individual songs are, in a sense, credentials of
membership. Each song is strictly individual, and refers to a personal
experience.
" In most societies," says Miss Fletcher, "as well as in the ceremonies
of the tribe, the songs are led by a choir, or by persons
officially appointed as leaders. The members of the society frequently
join in the song. I do not recall anyone performing a
dramatic dance and singing at the same time. While all dances are
accompanied by song, many songs are sung without dancing.
"Some of the dancing is not violent in action, the movement is
merely rhythm and swaying. In such dances, the dancers sing as
they move. Occasionally, as I recall, the song for a dance which is
dramatic and vigorous, bringing all the body into play, will be sung
by the choir (men and women seated about the drum). Some of the
people sitting and watching the dance may clap their hands in
rhythm with the drum. This, however, is playfulness by some privileged
person and indicates enjoyment."
208
THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY
among savage or peasant communities prove nothing at
all as to origins; certainly they do not prove that collective
poetic feeling and authorship preceded individual feeling
and authorship. Testimonies as to tribal song ought to
outnumber testimonies as to individual song, since the
spectator is chiefly interested in tribal ways. He would
be struck by and record tribal ceremonies, rituals, and
songs, where individual doings would escape attention or
seem unimportant. Besides, choruses would no doubt be
more numerous than solos, and bound up with more
important occasions; much as solo dances are infrequent,
among savage tribes, compared to mass dancing. To
reiterate, however, testimony no matter how great its
quantity, that savage peoples sing and dance in throngs,
or improvise while doing so, proves nothing as to the
priority of communal over individual feeling, authorship,
and ownership.
The evidence concerning primitive song which should
have greatest weight is not that of travellers and explorers,
interested chiefly in other things than song, but that of
special scholars, who have recorded and studied available
material with a view to its nature, its composition, and its
vitality. Among these there seems to be neither doubt nor
divergence of opinion; and their testimony is at variance
with the now established tradition of the literary historian.
I wish to make clear in advance that I have no desire
to deny the general social inspiration of song. In a broad
sense, all art is a social phenomenon-the romanticists to
the contrary. Song is mainly a social thing at the present
time, and it was yet more prevailingly social among our
remote ancestors. I wish rather to examine the following
specific hypotheses: the inseparableness of primitive dance,
music, and song; the simultaneous mass-composition of
primitive song; mass-ownership of primitive song; the
209
LOUISE POUND
narrative character of primitive song; the non-existence of
the primitive artist. I also have strong doubts concerning
the birth of rhythmic or musical utterance from rhythmic
action, if this be conceived as a form of limb or bodily
motion.
In the following citations of illustrative material, I have
drawn primarily upon American Indian material. It is
this material, on the whole, which has been collected and
studied most carefully. Coming as it does from homogeneous
primitive peoples, in the tribal state, having one standard
of life, and as yet unaffected by the poetic modes of
civilization, it should have importance for the questions
under discussion. Parallel material available from South
America, Africa, Australia, and Oceania, yields, however,
the same evidence.
III
INDIVIDUAL AUTHORSHIP AND OWNERSHIP
That American Indian song is of individual composition,
not the product of group improvisation, much evidence
may be brought to support. It will be seen also, from the
illustrative material cited, that the Indian has a feeling of
private ownership in his song. It would be reasonable,
therefore, to assume that, as far back as we can go in primitive
society, there should be a sense of individual skill in
song-making, as of individual skill in running, hurling a
dart, leaping, or any other human activities. There is
something absurd in singling out musical utterance as the
one form of expression having only social origin or social
existence.
A large number of Indian songs are said to have come
into the mind of the Indian when he was in a dream or a
trance (surely not a "communal" form of experience!).
210
THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY
Mlany of the Chippewa songs, for example, are classified as
"dream songs." Says Miss Densmore: 17
Many Indian songs are intended to exert a strong mental influence,
and dream songs are supposed to have this power in greater
degree than any others. The supernatural is very real to the Indian.
He puts himself in communication with it by fasting or by physical
suffering. While his body is thus subordinated to his mind a song
occurs to him. In after years he believes that by singing this song
he can recall the condition under which it came to him-a condition
of direct communication with the supernatural.18
It is said that in the old days all the important songs were
"composed in dreams," and it is readily understood that the man
who sought a dream desired power superior to that he possessed.
A song usually came to a man in his "dream "; he sang this song
in the time of danger or necessity in the belief that by so doing he
made more potent the supernatural aid vouchsafed to him in the
dream. Songs composed, or received, in this manner were used on
the warpath, in the practice of medicine, and in any serious undertaking
of life.'9
7"Frances Densmore, Chippewa Music, i, ii. Bulletin 45 (1910)
and 53 (1913), Bureau of American Ethnology. For examples see
I, pp. 118 ff., n, pp. 37 ff.
s Ibid., I, p. 118.
9 Ibid., I, p. 16. Compare also: "There is no limit to the number
of these [ghost-dance songs] as every trance at every dance produces
a new one, the trance subject after regaining consciousness embodying
his experience in the spirit world in the form of a song,
which is sung at the next dance and succeeding performance until
superseded by other songs originating in the same way. Thus a
single dance may easily result in twenty or thirty new songs" (James
Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion, 14 Report, Bureau of Ethnology,
Part i, 1896, p. 952). Many trance songs from many tribes are
given pp. 953-1101.
For testimony from Australia, see A. W. Howitt, The Native
Tribes of South-East Australia, London, 1904. He says, p. 416, "In
the tribes with which I have acquaintance, I find it to be a common
belief that the songs, using that word in its widest meaning, as
including all kinds of aboriginal poetry, are obtained by the bards
from the spirits of the deceased, usually of their kindred, during
sleep, in dreams. . The Birraark professed to receive his poetic
inspiration from the Mrarts, as well as the accompanying dances,
which he was supposed to have seen first in ghost-land. ... In the
211
212 LOUISE POUND
There is also testimony as to private ownership.20
The Chippewa have no songs which are the exclusive property of
families or clans. Any young man may learn his father's songs,
for example, by giving him the customary gift of tobacco, but he
does not inherit the right to sing such songs, nor does his father
force him to learn them.2
W'e learn further that the healer combines music and
medicine. " If a cure of the sick is desired, he frequently
mixes and rolls a medicine after singing the song which
will make it effective." 22 And that " The songs of a
Chippewa doctor cannot be bought or sold." 23
So far as the two men who heard me were concerned, the argument
was convincing, but there lingered even with them a reluctance
to help me with certain songs because they belonged to other persons.
Nearly all the Indians of my acquaintance recognize this proprietary
interest in songs. A has no right to sing B's songs; B did
not compose them, but they came down to him through his family,
or from some chief who fought him, and B alone should say whether
they might be given another.2
Miss Fletcher writes of the Omaha:
It would be a mistake to fancy that songs floated indiscriminately
about among the Indians, and could be picked up here and there by
any chance observer. Every song had originally its owner. It be-
Narrang-ga tribe there are old men who profess to learn songs and
dances from departed spirits. These men are called Gurildras. ...
In the Yuin tribe some men received their songs in dreams, others
when waking." Specimen songs follow.
2"An interesting seventeenth-century testimony is the following
from LeJeune's Relation, 1636: "Let us begin with the feasts of the
Savages. They have one for war. At this they sing and dance in
turn, according to age; if the younger ones begin, the old men pity
them for exposing themselves to the ridicule of the others. Each
has his own song, that another dare not sing lest he give offense.
For this very reason they sometimes strike up a tune that belongs
to their enemies to aggravate them."-Jesuit Relations (Thwaites
ed.), vol. rx, p. 111.
1 Chippewa Music, I, p. 2. "Ibid., I, p. 20. 2 Ibid., p. 119.
"Burton, American Primitive Music, p. 118.
THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY 213
longed either to a society, secular or religious, to a certain clan or
political organization, to a particular rite or ceremony, or to some
individual. .. . The right to sing a song which belonged to an individual
could be purchased, the person buying the song being taught
it by the owner.
These beliefs and customs among the Indians have made it possible
to preserve their songs without change from one generation to another.
Many curious and interesting proofs of accuracy of transmittal
have come to my knowledge during the past twenty years,
while studying these primitive melodies .... Close and continued
observation has revealed that the Indian, when he sings, is not concerned
with the making of a musical presentation to his audience.
He is simply pouring out his feelings, regardless of artistic effects.
To him music is subjective: it is the vehicle of communication between
him and the object of his desire.26
Now a few testimonies as to individual authorship. A
first instance is from the songs of the Omaha. For the
complete story of this song, the reader is referred to the
account of Miss Fletcher:
At length the Leader stood up and said, "We have made peace,
we have come in good faith, we will go forward, and Wa-kon'-da
shall decide the issue." Then he struck up this song and led the
way; and as the men and women followed, they caught the tune, and
all sang it as they came near the Sioux village.28
2 Alice C. Fletcher, The Indin in Story and Song, pp. 115-117.
" Ibid., p. 22. The following passage from A Study of Omaha
Indian Music, p. 25, by Alice C. Fletcher and Francis LaFlesche, also
throws light on the composition of certain Indian songs:
Like the Poo-g'-thun, the Hae-thu-ska preserved the history of its
members in its songs; when a brave deed was performed, the society
decided whether it should be celebrated and without this dictate no
man would dare permit a song to be composed in his honor. When
a favorable decision was given, the task of composing the song devolved
upon some man with musical talent. It has happened that
the name of a man long dead has given place in a popular song to
that of a modern warrior; this could only be done by the consent of
the society, which was seldom given, as the Omahas were averse to
letting the memory of a brave man die. . . . the songs were transmitted
from one generation to another with care, as was also the
story of the deeds the song commemorated.
6
214 LOUISE POUND
Two instances from the Pawnee illustrate perfectly the
poet musing in solitude on the meaning of nature,-like a
sort of Pawnee Wordsworth!
The " Song of the Bird's Nest " commemorates the story
of a man who came upon a bird's nest in the grass:
He paused to look at the little nest tucked away so snug and
warm, and noted that it held six eggs and that a peeping sound
came from some of them. While he watched, one moved and soon a
tiny bill pushed through the shell uttering a shrill cry. At once the
parent birds answered and he looked up to see where they were. They
were not far off; they were flying about in search of food, chirping
the while to each other and now and then calling to the little ones
in the nest. . . . After many days he desired to see the nest again.
So he went to the place where he had found it and there it was as
safe as when he had left it. But a change had taken place. It was
now full to overflowing with little birds, who were stretching their
wings, balancing on their little legs and making ready to fly, while
the parents with encouraging calls were coaxing the fledglings to
venture forth. "Ah!" said the man, "if my people would only learn
of the birds, and like them, care for their young and provide for
their future, homes would be full and happy, and our tribe strong
and prosperous."
When this man became a priest, he told the story of the bird's
nest and sang its song; and so it has come down to us as from the
days of our fathers.27
The "Song of the Wren" was made by a priest who
noted that the wren, the smallest and least powerful of the
birds, excelled them all in the fervor of its song. " Here,"
he thought, "is a teaching for my people. Everyone can
be happy; even the most insignificant can have his song of
thanks."
So he [the priest] made the story of the wren and sang it; and
27 The Hako, A Pawnee Ceremony, in 22nd Report, Bureau of
American Ethnology, Part i, p. 170. See also The Indian in Story
and Song, p. 32.
THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY
it has been handed down from that day,-a day so long ago no man
can remember the time.28
Instances testifying to individual not communal composition
of song among the Chippewa are no less easily cited.
The following explanation of a certain song was given
by an Indian:
The song belonged to a certain man who sang it in the dances
which were held before going to war. When this man was a boy he
had a dream and in his dream he heard the trees singing as though
they were alive: they sang that they were afraid of nothing except
being blown down by the wind. When the boy awoke he made up
this song, in which he repeats what he heard the trees say. The true
meaning of the words is that there is no more chance of his being defeated
on the warpath than there is that a tree will be blown down
by the wind.29
The singer stated that he composed this song himself when he was
a child. The circumstances were as follows: His mother had gone
to a neighbor's, leaving him alone in the wigwam. He became very
much afraid of the owl, which is the particular terror of all small
Indians, and sang this song. It was just after sugar making and
the wigwams were placed together beside the lake. The people in
the other wigwams heard his little song. The melody was entirely new
and it attracted them so that they learned it as he sang. The men
28 The Hako, pp. 171-172. See also The Indian in Story and Song,
p. 56.
See A. W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia,
London, 1904, for instances of individual artistry among the Australians.
"The makers of Australian songs, or of the combined
songs and dances, are the poets, or bards, of the tribe, and are held in
great esteem. Their names are known in the neighboring tribes, and
their songs are carried from tribe to tribe, until the very meaning
of the words is lost, as well as the original source of the song. It is
hard to say how far and how long such a song may travel in the
course of time over the Australian continent," p. 414. See also Kurburu's
song, composed and sung by a bard called Kurburu, p. 420,
etc. Howitt refers to one man who composed (see Umbara's songs,
pp. 416, 423) when tossing about on the waves in a boat-not a very
"communal" method of composition.
29 Chippewa Music, I, p. 126, No. 112: "Song of the Trees."
215
216 LOUISE POUND
took it up and used it in their moccasin games. For many years it
was used in this way, but he was always given the credit of its composition.
8
The rhythm of this song is peculiarly energizing, and when once
established would undoubtedly have a beneficial physical effect. The
surprising feature of this case, however, is that the song is said to
have been composed and the rhythm created by the sick man himself.
8'
It is interesting to note that many Indian songs are composed
by women. The following are instances:
. . .They [the women] would gather in groups at the lodge of
the Leader of the war party, and in the hearing of his family would
sing a We'-ton song, which should carry straight to the far-away warriors
and help them to win the battle . . . The We'-ton song here
given was composed by a Dakota woman.32
It is said that the following [Chippewa] song was composed and
sung on the field of battle by a woman named Omiskwa'wegijigo'kwe
("woman of the red sky "), the wife of the leader, who went with
him into the fight singing, dancing, and urging him on. At last she
saw him kill a Sioux. Full of the fire of battle, she longed to play a
man's part and scalp the slain. Custom forbade that Chippewa
women use the scalping knife, although they carried the scalps in the
victory dance.
Song
at that time
if I had been a man
truly
a man
I would have seized.?8
9Ibid., p. 135, No. 121: "I am afraid of the Owl."
81Ibid., p. 95, No. 79: "
Healing Song." Compare also Franz
Boas on The Central Eskimo, Report Bureau of Ethnology, 1884-1885,
p. 649: "Besides these old songs and tales there are a great number
of new ones, and, indeed, almost every man has his own tune and his
own song. A few of these become great favorites among the Eskimo
and are sung like our popular songs."
32 Fletcher, Indian Story and Song, Weton Song, pp. 81, 85.
So also in the Omaha tribe: " We'tonwaan is an old and untranslatable
word used to designate a class of songs composed by women
THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY
Odjib'we [a Chippewa] stated that his wife's brother was killed
by the Sioux and that he organized a war party in return. The purpose
of the expedition was to attack a certain Sioux village located
on an island in Sauk river, but before reaching the village, the Chippewa
met a war party of Sioux, which they pursued, killing one man.
There were nine Chippewa in Odjib'we's party; not one was killed.
They returned home at once and Odjib'we presented the Sioux scalp
to his wife Dekum (" across ") who held it aloft in the victory dance
as she sung the following song.
Odjib'we
our brother
brings back.3
Much further evidence of the composition of songs by
Indian women might be cited.35
The preceding are specimen testimonies. They might
be added to indefinitely, and from other than Indian
sources. In accounts of African, Australian, or South
American tribes, one comes invariably upon the instance
of the individual who makes a song-very often in soliand
sung exclusively by them."-Fletcher and LaFlesche, The Omaha
Tribe, 27th Report, Bureau of American Ethnology, p. 421; cf. pp.
320-323 for other types of women's songs.
OChippewa Music, II, p. 111, No. 31: "If I Had Been a Man."
4 Ibid., p. 121, No. 39: Song of De-kum. Several other songs
composed by De-kum are given.
85 Compare Franz Boas, Chinook Lays, p. 224, Journal of American
Folk-Lore, 1888: "The greater part of those I have collected were
composed by women." He adds that for a great number of tunes the
"text is only a meaningless burden." For songs of the Kiowa composed
by a woman, see J. W. Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion, 14
Report, Bureau of EJthnology, Part in, 1896, pp. 1083, 1085, etc.
See also an article of interest by Alexander F. Chamberlain, Primitive
Woman as Poet, Journal of American Folk-Lore, vol. xVI (1903),
pp. 207 ff.
R. H. Codrington writes of the Melanesians (The Melanesians:
Studies in Their Anthropology and Folk-Lore, Oxford, 1891, p. 334):
"A poet or poetess more or less distinguished is probably found in
every considerable village throughout the islands; when some remarkable
event occurs, the launching of a canoe, a visit of strangers, or a
feast, song-makers are engaged to celebrate it and rewarded," etc.
217
LOUISE POUND
tude-and the song is recognised as his. The great mass
of primitive songs sung in communal or other gatherings
are either portions of religious rituals, didactic, or, still
oftener, magical in nature. Far from being improvised 36
for the occasion, they are sedulously repeated verbatim, the
least deviation from the rote form being the occasion, not
infrequently, of an entire recommencement of the ceremony.
Songs composed and sung by individuals and songs sung
by groups of singers (or " throngs," if you prefer) are to
be found in the most primitive of living tribes. That in
the earliest stage there was group utterance only, arising
from the folk-dance, is fanciful hypothesis. That primitive
song is of group composition or collaboration, not individual
composition, is quite as fanciful. Again, as far
38 Compare the testimony of Ramon Pane, concerning the Haytians,
in Ferdinand Columbus's Life of Christopher Columbus, ch. 14:
"They have all the superstitions reduced into old songs, and are directed
by them, as the Moors by the Alcoran. When they sing these,
they play on an instrument made of wood. ... To that music they
sing those songs they have got by heart. The chief men play on it,
who learn it from their infancy, and so sing it according to their
custom."
Substantially the same account is given by Peter Martyr d'Anghrera
(De Orbe Novo, English trans. by MacNutt, New York, 1912, vol. I,
p. 172): "When the Spanish asked whoever had infected them with
this mass of ridiculous beliefs, the natives replied that they received
them from their ancestors, and that they had been preserved from
time immemorial in poems which only the sons of chiefs were allowed
to learn. These poems are learned by heart, for they have no writing,
and on feast days the sons of chiefs sing them to the people in
the form of sacred chants."
For the North American Indians, see, for example, Washington
Matthews, Navaho Legends, Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society,
1897. An account of Navaho traditional songs is given pp.
23-27. See also note 273, p. 254, Navaho Music, by Prof. J. C. Fillmore.
Miss Fletcher gives similar testimony concerning Indian traditional
lays.
218
THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY
back as we can go in the genesis of song-craft, there are
impromptu songs, the spontaneous utterance of present
emotion, and there are traditional songs, survivals or
revivals of the songs of the past.37 Among primitive peoples
there is no such indissoluble connection between singing
and dancing as the italicized observations of Dr.
Ehrenreich are supposed to imply. Neither dancing nor
song is invariably " choric " in savage any more than in
civilized society. Solo dancing, for example, has been
reported among the Semang of Perak, the Kwai, and the
Andamanese, as well as among the American Indians and
numerous other peoples. As for solo singing, the citations
given speak for themselves.38 Even when the singing is
choral, it is by no means always dance-song, nor accompanied
by dancing. The Kaffirs are said to be fond of singing
lustily together, but, if we may trust the observation, " a
Kaffir differs from an European vocalist in this point,
namely, that he always, if possible, sits down when he
sings." 39 Surely these recumbent Kaffirs deserve italics
quite as much as Dr. Ehrenreich's Botocudos.40
8' Improvisation exists among the Obongo, Australian, Fijiian, AndaTmanese,
Zulu, Botocudo, and Eskimo tribes, as well as among the
North American Indians. Traditional songs persist among the Kwai,
Australian, Andamanese, Rock Vedda, Semang, Fijiian, Fuegian, and
Eskimo tribes, as well as among the North American Indians.
8s See also citations in note 42.
9 J. E. Wood, Uncivilized Races of the World (Amer. ed., Hartford,
1870), p. 208.
40 We really know very little concerning the songs of the Botocudos.
Dr. Ehrenreich's section dealing with them is very short, and he is
chiefly interested in other things than song. These are the specimens
he cites:-Gesang beim Tanz. Chor: "Weib jung, stehlen
nichts." Ein Weib singt: "Ich, ich will nicht (stehlen)." "Der
Hauptling hat keine Furcht "-Zeitschrift fiur Ethnologie, vol. xix,
pp. 33, 61.
Testimony concerning the songs of other Brazilian tribes may be
found in J. B. Steere's Narrative of a Visit to the Indian Tribes of
219
LOUISE POUND
The conception of individual song can be shown to exist
among the very lowest peoples. Professor Gummere's belief
is that human beings get together for rhythmic movement,
begin to sing, and thus song is born. But the same
savage tribes that sing in groups tell stories in which individual
songs appear. Among the myths of the wilder
tribes of Eastern Brazil, for example, (illustrated in 0
Selvagem, the well-known collection of Jose V. Couto de
Magalhaes), there are many in which the composition and
singing of songs by individuals form important incidents.
This fact shows plainly that the authors of these myths
were perfectly familiar with the conception of individual
composition. Granting the manifestations of primitive
singing and dancing throngs which seem so decisive to
Professor Gummere, they are capable of quite other
interpretations than those which he puts upon them.
the Purus River, Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1901,
pp. 363-393. The following are songs of the Hypurinas (cannibals),
and are individualistic in character: "The leaf that calls my lover
when tied in my girdle" (Indian girl's song); "I have my arrows
ready and wish to kill you "; "Now no one can say I am not a warrior.
I return victorious from the battle "; "I go to die, my enemy
shall eat me."
The following are some songs of the Paumari, a "humble cowardly
people who live in deadly fear of the Hypurinas ": "My
mother when I was little carried me with a strap on her back. But
now I am a man I don't need my mother any more "; "The Toucan
eats fruit in the edge of my garden, and after he eats he slngs";
"The jaguar fought with me, and I am weary, I am weary." The
following they call the song of the turtle: "I wander, always
wander, and when I get where I want to go I shall not stop, but
still go on."
Hunting songs of the Bakairf, of the Xingu river region, egoistic
in character, are cited by Dr. Max Schmidt, Indianerstudien in
Zentralbrasilien, Berlin, 1905, pp. 421-424.
The "I" of these songs of South American tribes cannot always
be "racial." The context shows that, sometimes, at least, it must be
egoistic, as in the individualistic songs of the North American
Indians.
220
THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY
IV
THE " BATT,AT) AS THE EARLIEST POETIC FORM
And now what truth is in the assumption that the
ballad-dance is the germ from which emerged the three
separate arts, poetry, music, dance ? A passage by Professor
Moulton, affirming this, has been cited, and this passage
presents, without doubt, a view now widely accepted
in the United States.
Let us ask, first, in what sense the word " ballad" is
used by those who derive poetry from it. Does Professor
Moulton, for example, use the word ballad in its etymological
sense of " dance song," leaving undetermined the character
of the words, whether meaningless vocables, purely
lyrical, or prevailingly narrative ? Usually the classification
" ballad" is employed of lyric verses having a narrative
element. By "ballad" we are supposed to mean a
narrative song, a story in verse, a short narrative told
lyrically. It is a loose usage which permits scholars to use
the word in the sense both of dance song and of lyrical narrative,
in the same work; the ambiguity is unnecessary.41
If ballad means something like dance song, or choral dance,
or folk-dance accompanied by improvisation and refrain,
the term ballad-dance is tautological; for all ballads involve
dancing. One wishes for more precision. But this need
not detain us here.
In whichever sense the term ballad be used, it is somewhat
rash to place the ballad dance so certainly at the
source of man's musical and poetical expression. We have
'In which sense, for example, does Professor G. P. Krapp (The
Rise of English Literary Prose, 1915, Preface) use "ballad" when he
writes, " Poetry of primitive origins, for example the ballad, often attains
a finality of form which art cannot better, but not so with
prose ?"
221
LOUISE POUND
just seen that there is individual composition and singing,
song unaccompanied by dancing, and dance unaccompanied
by song, as far down in the cultural scale as we
can go. Certainly if ballad means, as usually it does,
song-story, the ballad was not the earliest form of poetry;
and primitive people never danced to ballads. The earliest
songs we can get track of are purely lyrical, not
narrative. The melody is the important thing; the words,
few in number and sometimes meaningless, are relatively
negligible. Moreover, these songs are on many themes, or
have many impulses beside festal dances. There are healers'
songs, conjurers' songs, hunting songs, game-songs,
love songs, hymns, laments, victory songs, and lyrics of
personal feeling and appeal. The lullaby is as old a lyric
form as we are likely to find. Who cares to affirm that
lullabies were unknown to our aboriginal ancestors ? Yet
the lullaby has nothing to do with the singing and dancing
throng! INor has that other very early species, the medicine
man or healer's solos; nor have gambling or game
songs,42 or love songs. Primitive labor songs are social,
See Stewart Culin, Games of the North American Indian, 24
Report, Bureau of Ethnology, 1907, for an account of singing in the
Moccasin or Hidden-Ball game, pp. 335 ff. Solo singing among the
Chippewa is mentioned, p. 341, among the Menominee, p. 343, the
Miami, p. 344, the Seneca, p. 350, the Wyandot, p. 351, etc. See
also Edward Sapir, Song Recitative i Paiute Mythology, Journal of
American Folk-Lore, 1910, p. 455, vol. xxI: "Generally Indian
music is of greatest significance when combined with the dance in
ritualistic or ceremonial performances. Nevertheless the importance
of music in non-ceremonial acts-for instance in the hand-game
played by all the tribes west of the Rockies-should not be minimized."
There are solo-singing Bantu, Zulu, Fuegian, etc., witch-doctors
and medicine men, as well as solo-singing North American Indian
medicine men and gamesters. See also, for some instances of solo
singing, H. A. Junod, Les Chantes et les Contes des Ba-Ronga, pp.
39, 44, etc., Lausanne, 1897; also G. Landtman, The Poetry of the
222
THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY
but they do not involve dancing, and they are not ballads.
The class that is nearest the real ballad, in that it is based
on happenings, or on the composer's experiences, is not by
any means the largest or the most important group for
primitive song. Songs of this latter type may be suggested
by some event, or may present some situation; but they
tell no story in the sense of real telling. That demands
length, elaboration, completeness, beyond primitive
powers. If we try to fix chronology, it is most plausible
to begin with rhythmic action and with melody. Professor
Gummere thinks that melody is born of rhythmic action.
But vocal action of the singing type, i. e., melody,
may well be as instinctive in man as in birds. Action and
melody in singing may well have come together; for song
interprets primarily feeling, emotion, not motion. In any
case, words came later than melody, and real narrative
later yet. As a lyrical species, the narrative song is a late,
not an early, poetical development. If we look at what
certain evidence we have, primitive songs are very brief,
the words are less important than the music, indeed they
need hardly be present; and they rarely tell a story. I
have found no case in which a primitive song tells a story
with real elaboration or completeness. Nor need these
songlets always have their origin in the choral-specifically
in the improvisation and communal elaboration of a
festal dance. Why, then, apply the term ballad to the
brief and simple lyrical utterances, often nothing more
than the repetition of a few syllables, or of one syllable,
Kiwai Papuans, Folk-Lore, vol. xxiv (1913), p. 308; Howitt, The
Native Tribes of South-East Australia, pp. 275, 388, 396-399; James
Cowan, The Maoris of Newv Zealand, pp. 218, 219; E. H. Gomes,
Seventeen Years Among the Sea Dyaks of Borneo, pp. 225, 226, 228,
as "The song of mourning is among some tribes sung by a professional
wailer, generally a woman."
223
LOUISE POUND
which-according to the evidence-makes up the great
body of primitive song ?
But it is time to bring up a few illustrations.
First place may well be given to the words of Miss Alice
Fletcher, who has had thirty-five years of acquaintance
with Indian music:
The word 'song' to our ears, suggests words arranged in metrical
form and adapted to be 'set to music,' as we say. The native word
which is translated 'song' does not suggest any use of words. To the
Indian, the music is of primal importance, words may or may not
accompany the music. When words are used in a song, they are
rarely employed as in a narrative, the sentences are not apt to be
complete. In songs belonging to a religious ceremony the words
are few and partake of a mnemonic character. They may refer to
some symbol, may suggest the conception or the teaching the symbol
stands for, rarely more than that. Vocables are frequently added
to the word or words to eke out the musical measure. It sometimes
happens that a song has no words at all, only vocables are used to
float the voice. Whether vocables alone are used or used in connection
with words, they are never a random collection of syllables.
An examination of hundreds of songs shows that the vocables used
fall into classes; one class is used for songs denoting action, another
class for songs of a contemplative character, and it is also
noted that when once vocables are adapted to a song they are never
changed but are treated as if they were actual words.43
She writes elsewhere to the same effect:
In Indian song and story we come upon a time when poetry is not
yet differentiated from story and story not yet set free from song.
We note that the song clasps the story as part of its being, and the
story itself is not fully told without the cadence of the song....
The difference between spontaneous Indian melodies and the compositions
of modern masters would seem to be not one of kind but of
degree. . . . Many Indian songs have no words at all, vocables only
being used to float the voice.44
The investigator of Ojibway song also finds the melody
4aThe Study of Indian Music, 1915, pp. 231-232.
Indian Story and Song, pp. 121, 124, 125.
224
THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY
to be more important than the words, and has nothing to
say of an inevitable relation between dancing and song:
His [the Ojibway] poetry is not only inseparable but indistinguishable
from music.... Among all civilized peoples the art of
expression through verse is one thing, and the art of expression
through modulated tones is quite another, linked though they often
are by the deliberate intent of the composer, and always associated
in the popular mind; in the Ojibway conception the two arts are
not merely linked inseparably, they are fused in one. . .45
The Ojibway is more gifted in music than in poetry; he has
wrought out a type of beautiful melody, much of it perfect in form;
his verse, for the most part, has not emerged from the condition of
raw material.46
He does sing his new melody to meaningless syllables, tentatively
correcting it here and there, but meantime experimenting with words
that convey meaning; and the probability is that the precise sentiment
of the words finally accepted is established by rhythmic considerations,
those that fall readily into the scheme of accents appealing
to him as the most suitable vehicle for the melody.47
The melody and the idea are the essential parts of a Mide song.
Sometimes only one or two words occur in a song. . . . Many of the
words used in a Mid6 song are unknown in the conversational Chippewa
of the present time.48
A number of Chippewa songs, as transcribed, have no words. Some
of these songs originally may have had words and in a limited number
of love songs the words partake so much of the nature of a
soliloquy that they cannot conveniently be translated and given with
the music. The words of most of the Chippewa songs are few in
number and suggest rather than express the idea of the song. Only
in the love songs and in few of the Mid6 songs are the words continuous.
49
45 Burton, American Primitive Music, p. 106.
4Ibid., p. 172.
' Ibid., p. 173.
'4Frances Densmore, Chippewa Music, I, 1910, pp. 14, 15.
"Ibid., n, 1913, p. 2. Similarly Washington Matthews, Journal
of American Folk-Lore, 1894, p. 185, writes of traditional songs
among the Navahos, "One song consists almost exclusively of meaningless
or archaic vocables. Yet not one syllable may be forgotten
or misplaced."
225
LOUISE POUND
Such evidence may be multiplied indefinitely.50 The
brevity of Indian songs is striking. Many have few words,
some one word, and some no words. The songs of other
savage peoples show the same characteristic. There are
one-word traditional poems among the African Kwai, and
two-word traditional poems of the Botocudos and the Eskimos.
These are not narrative songs, and they need not
be dance songs; for savage peoples do not always dance
their verses. They are not, then, "ballads." Nor need
they have any relation to choral improvisation.
Literary historians have dwelt too much, it seems to me,
on the festal throng and communal improvisation and the
folk-dance, when dealing with the " beginnings of poetry,"
until the whole subject has been thrown out of focus. The
term ballad might well be left out of account altogether
and reserved for the lyric species, appearing late in literary
history, the "epic in little," or " short narrative told
lyrically" exemplified in the conventional ballad collections.
If we are to mean by ballads narrative songs like
those of the middle ages, or narrative songs wherever they
appear, we should certainly cease placing the ballad at the
source of primitive poetry. It is not proved that the ballad,
in any sense, came first, or even that choral songs preceded
solos. It is likely enough that choral song and solos
co-existed from the beginning, or even that solos preceded,
for all that can be certainly known. The assumption that
group power to sing, to compose songs, and to dance, precedes
individual power to do these things,51 is fatuously
0It is obvious to the student of negro songs that these songs
tend to retrograde to the simple repetition 'of phrases rather than
to assume a narrative type.
'Erich Schmidt ("Anflange der Literatur," p. 9, in Kultur der
Gegenwart, Leipzig, 1906, I) writes: . . . schon weil keine Masse
nur den einfachsten Satz unisona improvisieren kann und alle romantischen
Schwirmereien von der urheberlos singenden "Volksseele"
226
THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY
speculative. It rests neither on "overwhelming evidence"
nor on probability. The individual ought to be able to
engage in rhythmic motion, to compose tunes, and then to
evolve words for these tunes, at least as early as he is able
to do these things along with others of his kind. And let
it be said again that it is safer to affirm that the primitive
lyric, whether individual or choral, is not the ballad but
the song-more strictly, the songlet.
V
IMPROVISATION AND FOLK-SONG
From the preceding discussion, it seems clear that it is
time to instil caution into our association of the primitive
festal throng improvising and collaborating, and hypothetical
throngs of peasants or villagers collaborating in
the creation of the English and Scottish popular ballads.
Primitive song and the mediaeval ballads are separate
phenomena, with a tremendous gulf in time and civilization
between. No doubt some of the choral improvisations
of savage peoples found or find permanence, as is the case
with individual improvisations, and also with songs
thought out in solitude-or " dreamed" in the Indian
way. But such songs-consisting of a few words, or a
few lines monotonously repeated-are quite a different
eitel Dunst sind, muss sich Sondervortrag und Massenausbruch sehr
friih gliedern. Einer schreit zuerst, einer singt und springt zuerst,
die Menge macht es ihm nach, entweder treulich oder indem sie bei
unartikulierten Refrains, bei einzelnen Worten, bei wiederkehrenden
Satzen beharrt.
In this connection, since it deserves to be cited somewhere, may
be quoted a passage from von Humboldt: "The Indians pretend that
when the araguatos [howling monkeys] fill the forests with their
howling, there is always one that chaunts as leader of the chorus."-
A. von Humboldt, Travels in the Equinoctial Regions of America,
Bohn edition, vol. n, p. 70.
227
LOUISE POUND
thing from improvisations of length, having a definite
narrative element, and high artistic value as poetry. Most
primitive improvisations are no tax on the memory, and
hardly, in view of their brevity, on the creative power.52
A singer with a good voice and a turn for melody might
succeed, whether he could compose words very well or not.
But when it is aiffirmed that improvising folk-throngs
created the literary type appearing in the English and
Scottish ballads of the Child collection, pieces like "The
Hunting of the Cheviot," the Robin Hood pieces, "Sir
Patrick Spens," "Lord Randal," etc., the affirmation is
pure-and not too plausible-conjecture. We have to do
with long, finished narratives, obeying regular stanzaic
structure, provided with rhyme, and telling a whole story
-pretty completely in older versions, more reducedly in
the later. To assume that ignorant uneducated people
composed these, having the power to do so just because
they were ignorant and uneducated-that is quite a different
thing, and it finds no support in the probabilities.
Of late years a considerable number of pieces composed
by groups of unlearned people whose community life
socialized their thinking have been made available to students
of folk song, namely American cowboy and lumberman
songs, and negro spirituals. It is hardly likely that
human ability has fallen greatly since the middle ages; yet
52 In the field of primitive ritual song there are many feats of
memory that are quite wonderful. Long years are required for an
Indian to become a really adept renderer of tribal rituals. See,
for examples of verbal length, in the 27th Report of the Bureau of
American Ethnology, the ritual song of 39 lines on p. 42, or that
of 50 lines on pp. 571-572, at the bottom very nobly poetic. Similar
examples are to be found in other tribes. Also there is something
remotely analogous to ballad structure in such ritual songs as are
given on pp. 206-242 of The Hako. But these ritual songs are not
improvisations; nor are they of "communal" rendering.
228
THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY
when we see what is the best that communal composition
can achieve now, and are asked to believe what it created
some centuries ago, the discrepancy becomes unbelievable.
53 The American pieces which, according to their
collectors, have been communally composed, or at least
emerged from the ignorant and unlettered in isolated regions,
afford ample testimony in style, structure, quality,
and technique to the fact that the English and Scottish
popular ballads could not have been so composed, nor their
type so established. In general, real communalistic or
peoples' poetry, as we can place the finger on it, composed
in the collaborating manner emphasized by Professor Gummere
and Professor Kittredge, is crude, structureless, incoherent,
and lacking in striking and memorable qualities.
There are now many collections of American folk-song,
made in many States. In these collections, the pieces of
memorable quality are exactly those for which folk-composition
can not be claimed. The few rough improvisations
which we can identify as emerging from the folk
themselves-which we actually know to be the work of unlettered
individuals or throngs-are those farthest from
the Child ballads in their general characteristics and in
their worth as poetry. Nor is there a single instance of
such an improvisation developing into a good piece, or
becoming, as time goes on, anything like a Child ballad.
Yet they emerged from throngs no less homogeneous, perhaps
more homogeneous than the mediseval peasants and
villagers.
The most homogeneous groups in the world are doubtless
the military groups; yet war and march songs are alu
See my New-World Analogues of the English and Scottish Popular
Ballads, the Mid-West Quarterly, April, 1916. Also The South
western Cowboy Songs and the English and Scottish Popular Ballads,
Modern Philology, October, 1913.
7
229
LOUISE POUND
ways appropriated, never composed by the soldiers. The
examples afforded by the war for the Union are still
familiar; the favorite song developed by the Cuban war 54
was adapted from a French-Creole song; and we know
the origin of the songs popular among the soldiers in the
present European war. If the " homogeneity " theory has
any value, it ought to find illustrations in army life. And
do prisoners in stripes and lock step ever invent songs?
Granting the "communal conditions" theory, our penitentiaries
should be veritable fountains of song and balladry.
As a matter of fact, the most famous of prison
ballads is the masterpiece of an accomplished poet,-
Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol."
Another thing shown by modern collections of folk-song
is that the songs preserved among the folk are nearly certain
not to be those composed by them. Those they make
themselves are just about the first to die. Usually some
special impetus, some cause for persistence or popularity,
is to be detected for the pieces that live. And the striking
or memorable qualities, or the special mode of diffusion,
necessary to bring vitality are just what the genuine
" communal" folk-pieces do not and cannot have.
The test of subject-matter should also be taken into account,
when we are considering the likelihood that some
process akin to the processes of primitive choral song and
dance-continued through untold centuries among villagers
and peasants-produced the Child ballads. Perhaps
I may be permitted to quote my own words here:
. . . The real communal pieces, as we can identify them, deal with
the life and the interests of the people who compose them. They
do not occupy themselves with the stories and the lives of the class
above them. The cowboy pieces deal with cattle trails, barrooms,
broncho riding, not with the lives of ranch-owners and employers;
54 Joseph T. Miles, "A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight."
230
THE BEGINNINGS OF POETRY 231
and the negro piece deals with the boll weevil, not with the adventures
of the owners of the plantations. iSongs well-attested as emerging
from the laboring folk throngs of the Old-World deal with the
interests of factory life or agricultural life, or with the adventures
of those of the social class singing or composing the songs. What
then must we think of the English and Scottish ballads, if the people
composed them? Their themes are not at all of the character to
be expected. They are not invariably on the work, or on episodes
in the life of the ignorant and lowly. Would they have had so great
vitality or have won such currency if they had dealt with labourers,
ploughmen, spinners, peasants, common soldiers, rather than with
aristocrats? The typical figures in the ballads are kings and princesses,
knights and ladies,-King Estmere, Young Beichan, Young
Hunting, Lord Randal, Earl Brand, Edward, Sir Patrick Spens,
Edom o'Gordon, Lord Thomas and Fair Annet, Lady Maisry, Proud
Lady Margaret, or leaders like the Percy and the Douglas. We
learn next to nothing concerning the humbler classes from them;
less than from Froissart's Chronicles, far less than from Chaucer.
The life is not that of the hut or the village, but that of the bower
and the hall. Nor is the language parallel to that of the cowboy
and negro pieces. It has touches of professionalism, stock poetic
formulae, alliteration, traces of the septenar meter. It is not rough,
flat, crude, in the earlier and undegenerated versions; instead there
is much that is poetic, telling, beautiful. It is for its time much
nearer the poetry coming from professional hands than what might
be expected from mediaeval counterparts of The Old Chisholm Trail
and The Boll Weevil. No doubt there existed analogues of these
pieces, i. e., songs which were sung by and were the creation of ignorant
and unlettered villagers; but we may be certain that these
mediaeval analogues were not the Child ballads."
On the whole, the type of the mediaeval ballad, with
choral refrain, is more likely to have emerged from mediaeval
music-to have been determined by the kind of melodies
which prevailed, the lyrical treatment given them, or
the type of dance they accompanied-than to be the amazingly
persistent legacy of the dance-songs of primitive
man. It is far less likely that primitive man established the
lyrical species we now call ballad '6 than that this species
' The Mid-West Quarterly, April, 1916, pp. 179-180.
" Of " incremental repetition," often emphasized as inherited from
primitive poetry, and held to be the surest proof of the communal
LOUISE POUND
derived from the aristocratic song, or dance, or minstrel
modes, of the mediaeval bower and the hall. The English
and Scottish ballads should no longer be inevitably related
to primitive singing and dancing throngs, improvising
and collaborating. We can not look upon creations
of such length, structure, coherence, finish, artistic value,
adequacy of expression, as emerging from the communal
improvisation of simple uneducated folk-throngs. This
view might serve so long as we had no clear evidence before
us as to the kind of thing that the improvising folkmuse
is able to create. When we see what is the best the
latter can do, under no less favorable conditions, at the
present time, we remain skeptical as to the power of the
mediaeval rustics and villagers. The mere fact that the
mediaeval throngs are supposed to have danced while they
sung, whereas modern cowboys, lumbermen, ranchmen, or
negroes do not, should not have endowed the mediaeval
muse with such striking superiority of product.
The subjects, the authorship and composition of primitive
song, and the authorship and composition of the English
and Scottish popular ballads, are distinct; and, for
both, the unqualified affirmation of "communal " origin
should no longer be made.
LOUISE POUND.
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Footnotes:
1 The Study of Indian Music. Reprinted from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. I, p. 233. 1915.
Compare a custom among the Karok, an Indian tribe of California (Stephen Powers, Contributions to North American Ethnology, vol. in, p. 29, Washington, 1877).
2. References of chief importance for the American Indians are Frederick R. Burton, American Primitive Music, with especial attention to the songs of the Ojibways, New York, 1909; Natalie Curtis, The Indian's Book, New York, 1900; and the following thorough studies: Frances Densmore, Chippewa Music, in Bulletins 45 (1910) and 53 (1913) of the Bureau of American Ethnology; Alice C. Fletcher, A Study of Omaha Indian Music, Papers of the Peabody Museum, vol. VII, No. 5, 1893, Indian Story and Song, Boston, 1900, The Hako: a Pawnee Ceremony, 22 Report (1904), Bureau of American Ethnology, and The Study of Indian Music quoted supra; James Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion, 14 Report, Bureau of Ethnology, Part u, 1896. Excellent pieces of work are "Hopi Songs" and "Zufii Melodies," by B. I. Gilman, published respectively in the Journal of American Ethnology and Archceology, vol. I, 1891 and vol. v, 1908, but nothing is said in these regarding the composition or
presentation of the songs recorded.
Here also may be cited F. Boas, The Central Eskimo, Bureau of American Ethnology, 1884-1885, Songs and Dances of the Kwakiutl, etc., Journal of American Folk-Lore, 1888, Eskimo Tales and Songs, ibid., 1894; F. J. de Augusta, Zehn Araukaner Lieder, Anthropos, VI, 1911. Many references are cited later, especially books, studies, or special articles dealing with South American, African, and Australian tribes.
origin of the ballad type, Mr. John Robert Moore (The Influence of
Transmission on the English Ballads, Molder Language Review, xi,
1916, p. 398) writes: "Unfortunately . . . the facts seem to make
little provision for the theory; for it is the simple ballads which
most often have the fixed refrain, and the broadsides which exhibit
the most marked use of incremental repetition. Furthermore, when
oral tradition adds a refrain to an original printed broadside, it is
only a simple refrain, without the structural device of accretion
which Professor Gummere considers so characteristic." . . .