The Border Widow's Lament

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A Scottish-English Border Ballad - Anon.

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My love he built me a bonny bower,
And clad it a’ wi’ lilye flour
A brawer bower ye ne’er did see,
Than my true love he built for me.

There came a man, by middle day,
He spied his sport and went away;
And brought the king that very night,
Who brake my bower, and slew my knight.

He slew my knight, to me sae dear;
He slew my knight and poin’d his gear;
My servants all did life for flee,
And left me in extremitie.

I sew’d his sheet, making my mane,
I watch’d the corpse myself alane
I watch’d his body night and day;
No living creature came that way.

I took his body on my back,
And whiles I gaed and whiles I sat;
I digged a grave, and laid him in,
And happ’d him with the sod sae green.

But think not ye my heart was sair,
When I laid the moule on his yellow hair?
O think na ye my heart was wae
When I turn’d about, away to gae?

Nae living man I’ll love again,
Since that my lovely knight was slain,
Wi’ a lock of his yellow hair,
I’ll chain my heart for evermair.

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Comment:

Anon was one of the best of poets, better than any now alive and writing in English it seems.

This ballad poem is almost unbearably moving, each stanza contains a superb phrase or more than one.

Like the greatest ballads, and presumably as a consequence of being honed through oral transmission, there is no padding: the story is told with extraordinary concision and lack of elaboration, assembled mostly from traditional lines, I guess.

But I wonder where that remarkable section came from "I took his body on my back,/ And whiles I gaed and whiles I sat."

It sounds horribly like personal experience.

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