The Life of the Dead in “The Unquiet Grave”- Toman 2013
[From Damien Tavis Toman; State University of New York at New Paltz; Department of English; dated 21 April 2013
R. Matteson 2015]
The Life of the Dead in “The Unquiet Grave”
Frequently named as one of the most aesthetically notable of the ballads compiled by F.J. Child—Leach calls it “exquisitely beautiful”—“The Unquiet Grave” has, at the very least, proved unusually enduring. With every passing decade, its lyrical fascination inspires a multitude of new recordings, each introducing some fresh variation on the arrangement and setting of the song, while almost always preserving with reverential fastidiousness something of its inviolably solemn and ancient character. As might be expected of so widely admired a composition, the text of the ballad itself is diffused among a bewildering range of permutations, across which the actual message of the story it tells is variously altered, obscured, or corrupted. While “The Unquiet Grave” persists as a fertile site of critical examination, the perennial question for the scholar is which version of the text to use, and to what theoretical ends. That a matter so fundamental as the sexes of the mourner and the departed is inconstant from one version to the next can be either vexing or propitious, depending on one’s critical agenda.
Among the numerous readings of this mysterious ballad’s many variants, there is one defining truth upon which every editor, commentator, and critic since Child himself has been agreed: that it “exhibits the universal popular belief that excessive grieving for the dead interferes with their repose” (Child 167). While the explication here proposed does not presume to discredit so self-evident a facet of this ballad, it does endeavor to demonstrate what previous interpretations may have missed, which is the statement being made not simplyabout the relationship of the living to the dead, but about the natureof the afterlife itself: a vision strongly suggestive, I would argue, of the earthy, pre-Christian sensibility in which the lyric is rooted.
The version of “The Unquiet Grave” presently under consideration is the one first published by Child(designated 78A), and the one typically anthologized by ballad collections thereafter. It is most to be contrasted, perhaps, with that version of the song which Sabine Baring-Gould (1895) brought forth under the title “Cold Blows the Wind,” in that it alludes only faintly—if at all—to the wit-combat motif common among other ballads in the “revenant lover” strain. This choice is made, first, because contests of the wits between the living and the dead have already received exhaustive treatment elsewhere (see Atkinson, 1991), and second, because the absence (or extreme ambiguity) of such a contest in the shorter and presumably older rendering allows for a subtler reading than could be easily sustained in a supernatural ballad of less vividly pathetic import.
Preserving the narrative quality particular to the ballad form, “The Unquiet Grave” proceeds semi-regularly from one stanza to the next, with each stanza (one might as well say, verse) both containing its own isolated meaning and turning upon or answering the stanza that precedes it. Chronologically, however, the action is divided between several tenses, in a pattern resembling the self-encircling crisscrosses of a slipknot, from which there depends a heavy and pendulous present.
In a manner common among all versions of this ballad, albeit across a multitude of different phrasings, this one opens with an apostrophic address by the Lover to his Beloved—“The wind doth blow today, my love, / And a few small drops of rain.” (It is here for the first time that the Lover speaks directly to his Beloved, with the remainder of his utterances in this first section being asides to the audience or himself.) The value of this statement is inestimable: it not only quickly and descriptively establishes the scene upon which the ballad opens, but it provides a palpable and quite believable sense of atmosphere, which an outright downpour would have washed into melodrama. Indeed, it may be that the speaker is being soaked to the skin, but to his distracted senses, this seems unworthy of remark. Or it may be that he fears his Beloved would disapprove of his enduring a deluge on her account. Whatever the case, the Lover’s intensely dejected and sorrow-subdued temperament is further expressed in the subsequent two lines, which—following the setting of the scene—carry the whole burden of exposition for the narrative. Just as “a few small drops of rain” previously understates the uncomfortable surroundings, there is a sort of majestic bluntness in his confession that, “I never had but one true-love, / In cold grave she was lain.” Daunted by the ineffability of his destitution, the Lover reduces his situation to the skeletal facts: that was what she was; this is what she is now. Unlike later versions, in which the Beloved was “slain” in the forest (or in Granville, depending) we are here confronted with nothing but the plain and inescapable reality that she is dead—merely dead.
Having so much introduced the scenario, the section closes with a declaration of intention. “I’ll do as much for my true-love / As any young man may; / I’ll sit and mourn all at her grave / For a twelvemonth and a day.” Among the items at work in these two stanzas is the chiming of the phrase “true-love,” which, written thus in hyphenated form, gives a sense of possessing equal weight on either side of the hyphen. Rather than one modifying the other, the two words anchor each other in place, effectively producing a new term in which the trueness of the love and the love of its trueness are mutually indivisible, while the closed gap between them seems to preclude—or at least forefend against—the possibility of division. It proves, alas, a vain precaution. Death has prevailed, along with the unavoidable necessity of separating the living from the lifeless. Here the Lover must make a calculation: the firmness of his love-bond against the firmness of the earth that immures and conceals its object. It is not so much denial that holds him captive to the spot, but an acceptance that, though Death has been satisfied, Time remains frustrated. Whether by some now-obscure social precept, or by his own bewildered estimation, the Lover commits himself to a period of mourning, and then— with the extravagance expected of youth—purposely exceeds it. It is as if he has described the ledge from which he intends to tip himself: if “a twelvemonth” is equal to a lifetime, then “a day” longer can only denote the death that waits one step beyond.
So we have a sort of arrangement made with Time—a supernatural assignation guaranteed by the intuitive statutes of magical thinking. As soon as the sentence is spoken, the sentence is also served, and Time has taken us forward seemingly without a pretense to movement. “The twelvemonth and a day being up,” we read—but where were we in the meantime? On one hand, this hurrying into the next stanza is a privilege peculiar to the folk-ballad, which thrives upon the thrill of the moment—whether stretching it to the ends of endurance on a rack of maniac repetition, or striking it off in a spasm of brutish impatience. On the other hand, it simply serves to exemplify the twisting and doubling-over of temporal expectations that this ballad, at once linear and timeless—serial and surreal, so unaffectedly achieves. It collapses into a slight, blank interstice a whole year of grieving, and, as if the earth has been tilled and sown by the tears of the Lover, faithfully yields the voice of the Beloved.
It is, nevertheless, only a voice. And it is not a voice, either, of tenderness or sympathy, but of perturbation, agitation, non-recognition. “Oh who sits weeping on my grave,” it demands, “And will not let me sleep?” In a jarring (and implicitly terrifying) upset of the afterlife as we enjoy imagining it, the same time that has passed instantly for the mourner has been a long and restless epoch to the mourned. Or perhaps (for we cannot be sure) the Beloved has lain at rest, until the last day, when the Lover’s self- prescribedperiod of grief finally transgressesthe limits of decency. Either way, the dead are awake, and it is the living whohave awakened them: a frightful propensity, however conceived. We may think of “The Unquiet Grave” not simply as a revenant ballad, but as a ballad of necromancy—of the unwilling dead summoned by the importunateliving—a ballad fit for the séance-chamber.
The Lover, unsurprised, and as implacable as he is inconsolable, identifies himself, as all conjurers must, and presents hisconditions. “’Tis I, my love, sits on your grave, / And will not let you sleep,” he proclaims (emphasis added), suddenly suggesting that his year’s lachrymose labors were not intended to be without reward; “For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips, / And that is all I seek.” What is apparenthere most of all is an ellipsis of understanding between the hereafter and the here-and-now, the terrestrial and the spectral worlds. Far from exhibiting shock at the sound of his (admittedly irate) sweetheart’s voice, he is nonetheless disappointed by her lack of corporeality. He is a year older; he has given to Time a fleshly sacrifice. Is his boon to be thus intangible, thus remote? Though he is no less cognizant of the change that has come upon his Beloved,even still, through the blowing wind and the driving rain, he has mortified himself—so he believes—to Death’s satisfaction. In an Orphic turn upon the chivalric model, the desperate swain has tried to purchase his way into the presence of the shades with his suffering, where Orpheus himself might have used song. To him, humble rustic that he is, everything must be reducible to natural cycles and measurable exchanges: a year’s husbanding for a season’s crop, a year’s weeping for a corpse’s kiss, “clay-cold” though it must be.
One cannot help but read the Beloved’s response as one of gentle, remonstrating mockery. “You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips,” she repeats, amused, almost nonplussed, “But my breath smells earthy strong…” Whether our Lover is such an innocent as to be unacquainted with the facts of putrefaction, or so deluded as to believe his Beloved incorruptible, the specter—seeming to put off her initial annoyance— sees that she must coax him tenderly toward a resumption of his grief-toppled sanity. Comprehending that it is the dead, and not death itself, that the young man desires, she explains, “If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips, / Your time will not be long.” The mere fact that the Lover himself has assigned a limit to his mourning establishes that his will to live, however desolate, is yet not abandoned. A year is nothing to a youth in love, whose under-exercised heart has contained within its quaint bounds only one equally inexperienced companion; but Death teaches quickly what Life and Time can only by painful degrees impart. The body lives and dies but once: these animal joys are as ephemeral as they are insistent, made of such crumbling substance as no memory is sufficient to contain. The infant stifled in his swaddling sheets has lived as fully as the greybeard with all his regrets.
Another twist of the knot, and we are with the Lover and his Beloved as they were together in life. For the first time acknowledging the mourner as her intimate, she directs his attentions away from the site of his long vigil, beyond the gates of the churchyard. “’Tis down in yonder garden green, / Love, where we used to walk…” But not a moment is wasted in fond reflection. Even in the invocation of this graceful scene, so potently endowed with the suggestion of love and hope, the screen between the flesh-world and the spirit-world seems to filter away every trace of the old sentiment, and she blandly reports, “The finest flower that ere was seen/ Is withered to a stalk.” One can almost see the Lover’s countenance, momentarily raised in reverie, sink at once back into its habit of despair—yet the specter hastens mercilessly to her point. “The stalk is withered dry, my love, / So will our hearts decay…” It hardly seems proper, even, to call it a simile—any more than a man being shot like a dog is a simile for a dog being shot like a man. They are merely the same act perpetrated upon different subjects, with the same effects and the same moral resonance—hollow though that resonance may sound. Worse than this, it is not the inevitable decay of the body that she speaks of, but the inevitable decay of the heart— of that organ from which the Lover’s grief is so inexhaustibly drawn—withering in his own breast even as that of his Beloved is made the seraglio of worms. Banished is the hope held by even the most hopeless romantic, of being reunited with his “true-love” in the afterlife. The separation is total now, she concludes, as it was from the beginning: “So make yourself content, my love, / Till Godcalls you away.” Not “to my side,” not “back into my ever-devoted arms,” but simply “away”—as if to say that the dead themselves do not know where it is the dead go—only that they must go there alone.
In seeking to extract from this “fragmentary ballad”—as Child calls it—some sense of its creator’s conception of immortality, we are presented with a number of indistinct signs pointing to nothing so distinctly as the indistinctness of that same conception. In order to warn his auditors off from meeting the blunt reality of death either with an unnatural degree of lamentation or an unbecoming degree of trepidation, it appeared best for him to have that warning issued from the “cold-clay lips” of one who ought to know; but in so-doing, he was both confirming a belief in some kind of post-physical futurity, and, perhaps because his auditors were tillers of the earth, advancing the very physicality—the “earthiness”—of the existence to come. If there is any kind of heaven—that is,a habitation of spirits entirely separate from the world itself—the implication seems to be that the Beloved cannot advance thither until the last tear has been shed in her memory. It is the remembrances of living that keep the dead from their slumber, even as too-intimate contact with the dead Beloved would have accelerated the Lover’s progress toward the grave. Perhaps a tombstone is erected not for the purpose of remembering, but for the purpose of forgetting; to hold a permanent place for the departed that can counteract, as it were, the immediacy—and the eventual unreality—of her absence.
Works Cited
Child, Francis James. English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Eds. H.C. Sargent and G. L. Kittredge. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904.
Internet Archive. Web.
Leach, MacEdward ed. The Ballad Book. New York: A.S. Barnes & Co., 1955. Print