[Carl Copeland]

I love a good ballad too, Barbara, and enjoyed comparing yours with the Child version. A few thoughts:

I can get four beats out of every line if I work at it, but my first inclination is to give a number of them five or three. For example, to get four beats out of “Nobody knows where he’s been,” I have to stress both “knows” and “where,” which is unnatural for me. On the other hand, I’d naturally give “The enchantment failing, he was nearly free” four beats in speech, but that requires three consecutive unstressed syllables, which is normally taboo in metrical verse. Like Marshall, I’m not sure whether any of this is a problem for accentual meter.

There’s some clichéd language—the first two lines of S3, for example—but that may be less of a problem for a riff on a traditional ballad. “Stockinged” didn’t bother me, but the Yoda-speak “mum as a stone I must be” in S6L2-3 clashes with the natural, modern idiom you’ve chosen. S6L3 is one of the lines I want to give five beats, so how about something like:

“I’ve given my word to be mum as a stone,
but it’s nothing to do with you, Janet—

I’m not quite sure what “Tom Linne is all the man she loves” means. Is everything she loves? Is the only man she loves?

Typo: foresee.

Originally Posted by Richard G

I found the narrative hard to follow (the fact that there are two shes/hers doesn't help)

I wasn’t going to mention this, because I have a talent for misreading everything that can possibly be misread, but I first thought Janet kept Tom locked up at home while she went to the club!