Christina Rossetti chose to write "Cousin Kate" in the form of a ballad, a poetic style that uses an iambic meter and an ABCB rhyme scheme. One of the primary characteristics of this form is the way it taps into a genre far beyond the world of written poetry. The ballad is a traditional type of folk song dating back to the Middle Ages. In the English-speaking world ballads usually resemble "Cousin Kate" in terms of formal elements like rhyme and meter, but traditional ballads are set to music. A common way to pass down folkloric stories, ballads usually revolve around a narrative, which might be tragic like that of "Cousin Kate," but may also recount comic stories or heroic feats. Many popular English ballads have taken on multiple versions as they have been transmitted, especially as immigration from the British Isles to the United States carried certain ballads across the Atlantic. Here, we'll summarize a few popular folk ballads of the type that may have inspired Christina Rossetti's poem.
Perhaps the most well-known, or at least widely-collected, English folk ballad is the Ballad of Barbara Allen. Though it has many versions and indeed many titles—a side effect of its popularity—some core details remain the same. This song tells the story of a young woman (the Barbara Allen of the title) who is called to the bedside of a dying man. The man, who is in love with her, asks her for a kiss or expression of love, saying that her love can cure him. Barbara at first refuses, saying that the man has insulted her or flirted with other women. Consequently, the man dies—and then Barbara, also brokenhearted, dies as well. It's likely that this ballad originated in Scotland before spreading throughout the English-speaking world, including to North America in the nineteenth century. The famous seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys even writes about singing it with friends in 1665. More recently, "Barbara Allen" has been covered by artists including Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Simon and Garfunkel as part of a 1960s and 1970s folk music revival.
"The Ballad of John Henry," meanwhile, is a famous African American folk ballad, describing a supernaturally strong man who works drilling steel into a mountainside to create a railroad. He manages to drill rock faster than an industrial steam drill using only a hammer. In the end, John Henry's heart gives out from his efforts. In many versions, the baby John Henry is described "sitting on his mother's knee," predicting his own death. Some folklorists and historians have speculated that John Henry may have been loosely based on a real person and on real events, although, in the manner of other ballads, these events have been exaggerated and dramatized beyond recognition over the course of transmission. A variety of railroad sites in the Southern and Appalachian regions of the United States have been suggested as possible sites for John Henry's original contest with the steam engine, but (like many attempts to trace folkloric stories to specific real-life events) these investigations have been inconclusive. Meanwhile, many have interpreted this ballad as a tale of racial oppression and workers' exploitation, as well as thrilling heroism.
One particularly interesting example of a folk ballad is the song Lord Bateman, or Lord Beichan. Originally rooted in Britain, the song describes a nobleman who is taken prisoner abroad. He swears to join the first woman who is able to rescue him, but then disappears after his rescue, leaving the woman who came to his aid to chase him. The subsequent versions diverge from one version to another. Sometimes he marries his rescuer, and sometimes he weds another woman. Especially revealing are the changes that take place in American versions of the ballad. In these, the protagonist tends to lose his noble title, and is instead referred to as "Lloyd Bateman." This reflects the United States' lack of aristocratic titles. Similarly, rather than voyaging from Britain to a faraway destination, the American protagonist sails from Georgia, in the U.S.
Christina Rossetti is far from the only poet to make use of the folk ballad as a basis for written work. A few famous examples of literary ballads include "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allen Poe, and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" by John Keats. Langston Hughes, William Butler Yeats, and Gwendolyn Brooks have also written ballads. The form pays homage to folk music, but, furthermore, the characteristics that made ballads useful for passing stories down orally make it an engaging literary form to this day. It is rhythmic, memorable, and just repetitive enough to create a sense of continuity. "Cousin Kate," therefore, is part of a long and multifaceted balladeering tradition that spans from the oral to the written, and from one continent to another.
