Thinking about the ballad “The Unquiet Grave” Given its small amount of characterization, this ballad seems to take a psychological approach and to ask how about the different responses in female and male mourners. There are other ballads like “Clerk Saunders” in which the male ghost returns and “he” wants a kiss. Since this would be fatal, the lovers come up with a trick that allows the living woman to transfer a kiss to him without actually touching him. It would be interesting to consider the larger social context of this ballad, to know the mortality rates and average age in the middle ages. Peasants didn’t probably stay un partnered. Fidelity is something modern readers care about.
The point of this ballad is the deflating of the notion of after-death fidelity. According to this ballad, to love ever-after is self-destroying. The recommendation for the mourner to get on with his life is put in the mouth of the dead woman. There are ghost poems by both men and women and so a gender perspective might note that many of the ballad singers, the people who kept songs like “An Unquiet Grave” alive and who transmitted them, were women. It might be noted, too, that the theme of “The Unquiet Grave” appears in the ballads and the lyrics of later poets. The Victorian Christina Rossetti does a version on the motif in “The Ghost’s Petition” and Thomas Hardy did a version “Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?” in which the dead woman discovers that her “little dog” is scratching on the grave! A poem about a dog’s fidelity gives a strange twist to the tradition..
The Essay on Do ghost exist?
Whether or not ghosts actually exist is a question that has been debated in almost every culture and region around the world since times immemorial. Those who believe in ghosts point to countless instances of unexplained phenomena in which strange sightings and paranormal happenings have taken place. The skeptics on the other hand dismiss such suggestions about “ghosts” as figments of ...
