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For a discussion of narrative verse in general, see Gummere's Poetics and Oldest English Epic, Hart's Epic and Ballad, Council's Study of Poetry, and Matthew Arnold's essay "On Translating Homer." Mod. Lang. Ass., vol. 21, 1906. All handbooks on Poetics discuss the Ode. Gosse's English Odes and William Sharp's Great Odes are good collections.
In Luxury Land everything was good to eat; houses were built of dainties and shingled with cakes; buttered larks fell instead of rain; the streams ran with good wine; and roast geese passed slowly down the streets, turning themselves as they went. Gummere's Old English Ballads is a good short work.
Professor Kittredge's Introduction to the Cambridge edition of Child's Ballads is the best summary of a very difficult subject. For an extended discussion of the literary character of the ballad, see Gummere's The Popular Ballad. Many things he has seen himself, he tells us, and these are certainly true; but others he has heard in his travels, and of these the reader must judge for himself.
A book like Gummere's Beginnings of Poetry, glancing as it does at the origins of so many national literatures and at the rudimentary poetic efforts of various races that have never emerged from barbarism, gives one a poignant sense of the prodigality of the song-impulse compared with the slenderness of the actual survivals. Autumn leaves are not more fugitive.
What were the chief subjects of the songs of the scop? How do they reveal the life of the time? Is there any common quality running through them? What qualities of this verse appear in modern poetry? Beowulf. Gummere's The Oldest English Epic; Morris and Wyatt's The Tale of Beowulf; Hall's Beowulf, Translated into Modern Metres;
Veitch's The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry. Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Gummere's Old English Ballads. Child's The English and Scotch Popular Ballads. Collins's Greek Influence on English Poetry. Tucker's The Foreign Debt of English Literature. Malory. Craik, Century, 19-33; Swiggett's Selections from Malory; Wragg's Selections from Malory, all contain good selections.
Frazer gives examples in the Golden Bough. Alien Wives. The Sister's Son. See Mr. Gummere's article in the English Miscellany; and Professor Rhys' Presidential Address to the Anthropological Section of the British Association, 1900. Swanmaids. See Hartland, Science of Fairy-Tales. The Waverlowe. Dr. For Svipdag and Menglad, see Study No. 12 of this series.
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