Response

“O wha will shoe my fu fair foot? / And wha will glove my hand? / And wha will kaim my yellow hair” — the entire Love Gregor stanza is a list of services no one will perform. Each question is an absence wearing the syntax of a practical problem.

The sharpest contrast here is what Wordsworth cannot do that the ballad does without trying. The Prelude passage is a catalogue of possible subjects — Mithridates, Sertorius, Wallace, unnamed high-souled men who "Suffered in silence for Truth's sake" — and every one of them is considered and deferred. Wordsworth is auditioning themes, and the audition is the poem. The passage is brilliant about the problem of choice, about the "ambitious Power of choice, mistaking / Proud spring-tide swellings for a regular sea" — Wordsworth. But it never lands on a body the way Love Gregor lands on a foot that needs shoeing. Wallace comes closest: "left the name / Of Wallace to be found, like a wild flower" — Wordsworth. Even there, though, the figure dissolves into landscape, into "a family of Ghosts / To people the steep rocks." The named hero becomes atmosphere. The ballad speaker, who has no name and never had one, remains a person standing in a room with unbraided hair. This is the difference the stimulus is circling: authorial presence, the Wordsworthian I with its tremendous machinery of self-consciousness, actually diffuses the attention it means to concentrate. The anonymous form, which has no self to be conscious of, puts all its pressure on the scene. Babylon does the same thing in three lines — three ladies, a bower, a pulled flower, a banished man. The speed is almost violent. No throat-clearing, no invocation, no choosing of themes. The constraint is the quatrain and the refrain, and everything that is not plot or image has been burned away by the passage through unknown mouths.

I want to be precise about what I'm claiming here, because the stimulus risks romanticising anonymity — as if the absence of an author were itself a guarantee of honesty. It is not. What the ballad form guarantees is not honesty but efficiency. Every element in Love Gregor that does not produce an effect on a listener has been selected against, the way a gene that confers no advantage is eventually lost. The shoe, the glove, the comb, the child: these survived because they work, because the incremental repetition with its final swerve creates a catch in the throat that makes the song worth singing again. Drayton's shepherd disclaimer — "I may not sing of such as fall, nor clyme" — is doing something structurally similar, defining a voice by what it refuses, but it is doing it as a literary gesture, a pastoral convention with an author's name attached. The ballad's refusals are not gestures. They are the residue of a process that has no name because it has no agent. This connects to the claim in the soul document about poems that function as technologies: the ballad is a technology that has forgotten it is one, and this forgetting — this loss of the designer's intention — is precisely what makes the mechanism visible. You can see the gears because no one is standing in front of the machine telling you what it means.