[Yves S L]

Hello Mark,

I am not that familiar with the conventions of ballad form, but for me this ballad is not quite ballad-ing, in that there is a disconnect between the pieces of the drama, and I cannot help feeling that the progression of this whole poem needs to be more slant somehow.

In the quote you provided, Nell is described to be the shepherd's "childhood sweetheart" (which at least implies some sustained reciprocity and emotional depth) and yet she chose to be intimate with a dude named Hollinshed, and the crux of the drama is squaring those two facts, and how the squaring of those two facts casts a light on the two main actors Nell and the Shepherd, and how much that allows or does not allow the pathos.

Right now, the pathos of the first and last three stanzas is being unironically undercut by the shepherd coming across what current internet culture might call an unsymphatetic "incel simp". As if some dude killing himself over a local girl who he had briefly been close with in middle-school, whose Instagram photos he lusts over today in between his shifts at Target. One day some famous basketball player comes up loving over her in the photos, and then another day the dude is gone, and she's messaging news to her incel simp about being pregnant. In this scenario, the mother of the deceased girl would be astonished by the grandiose gesture of the dude stating he was going to kill himself to be with his "beloved". Some ever howling dog in this scenario is the definition of overkill.

Taking on Julie's suggestion and extending it, if the maid was untouched and had truly loved the shepherd since childhood and was waiting for marriage, but the Hollinshed dude took advantage of her, as landed gentry are oft to do in the world of severely unbalanced power dynamics, then that would make dramatic sense, and justify the pathos better.

Maybe the maid's mother fell ill, and she needed some money, and the money was promised if she agreed to marry Hollinshed, but he broke the promise, leaving her with a baby and no way out.

Maybe the dude is a delusional incel simp, and the dog goes howling becomes he mourns the senseless and unjustified suicide of his master.

Maybe the girl was "ugly" while young, and still the shepherd loved her, while Hollinshed ignored her and her advances. Something, anything to balance things out.

It feels like the poem grabbed the most obvious and soap-operatic solution to the problem and ran with it, letting the rhyme and meter carry the poem along.

Right now the shepherd and Hollinshed are as mirrors of each other, and the common trope of a rich man not being deserving does not break apart the symmetry, both of them wanting the maid for the beauty of the surface, and so it does not really matter who she chooses, and it is her choice to make, consequences and all.