Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland by Deborah A. Symonds (review)

Book Reviews aesthetic communication" (328). Unlike Wotdswotth, Eliot in his "fotays across 'frontiets of consciousness'" (321) sensed die mysterious and unpataphtasable meaning inherent in poetry's primitive dtumbeat. Matks clarifies Eliot's telling idea that a wotd's music rises out ofcrossed colotations—one from the odiet wotds in its immediate context, the othet from meanings and associations of the wotd in othet contexts. In the "musical" possibilities ofShakespeare's dramatic vetse, Eliot envisioned "one ofthe most dating conceptions ofpoetic language ever proposed" (329). Unlike Enlightenment Know-It-Alls and Postmodern Know-Nothings, Marks resides firmly in the camp ofthe Know-Somethings. Though he cannot espouse poststtuctutal excesses—Derrida's deconsttuctive hetmeneutics, nihilism, the death ofaesthetics, die authot, referentialiry, and the test—Matks in his Epilogue neithet ignores not distorts its innovations, as do some ofits strongest suppottets, both English and American. Ofpatticulat interest ate Matks' insights into Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman, celebtatots of poetic expressionism, "repelled by the dehumanizing tendencies of poststtuctutalism" (350). While litetary ideas become ever more subtle, poetic language temains a mystery. This paradox tantalizes not only poetry-lovers but egalitarian textualists who yearn to conflate undet the same linguistic laws the poetry ofJohn Keats and die pattet ofJohn Doe. During the great Anglophone debate, most disputants, Matks notes emphatically, sensed "that in poetry language is employed in a manner, and widi an effect, that sets it apart from all othet kinds of speech ot writing" (13). That no dieory has ever captured fully poetry's "unique essence" or the teadet's experience ofits "wondrous ways" is fot Matks axiomatic. To feel poetry's "magic," however, in no way "relegates to an exercise in futility die centuries ofeffort to discovet, and to fotmulate in tational tetms, the means by which that powet is activated" (21). Taming the Chaos is a mastetpiece of evaluative histoty, the refined teal thing that quickens the serious student once again to the discipline, beauty, and worth of litetary scholarship—itself no mean tarnet of the chaos, ^r Debotah A. Symonds. Weep NotforMe: Women, Ballads, andInfanticide in Early Modern ScotUnd. Univetsity Patk, PA: Pennsylvania State Univetsity Press, 1997. 289p. Gaye McCollum University of Nevada, Reno Many will immediately recognize the title of Debotah Symonds' book as a line from the refrain of the Scots ballad "Mary Hamilton": FALL 1998 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * 93 "Ye need nae weep for me," she says, "Ye need nae weep for me; For had I not slain mine own sweet babe, This death I wadna dee." And many will be eaget to discovet the circumstances that lay behind the familiat lament. In Symonds' treatment, the lives ofMary Hamilton and dozens more like het are revealed in a thoughtful combination ofballad litetature and research from legal archives. Scholars and critics with an interest in social history as well as in litetature will find a carefully researched, heavily annotated text dealing, first, with the place ofthe Scots ballads in the emetgent modern Scotland and ending in the use made of the Scots ballads by novelists such as Sit Waltet Scott. Here, het account of the ttansfotmation of the ballad heroine from a labot-hatdened woman to a comfortable, though impetuous, boutgeois daughtet is remarkable. Symonds begins with the methods and politics ofthe nineteenth-century ballad collectots, who, she points out, were blind to the possibility that ballads were women's litetature, and, though they held fitmly to the "belief that ballads had originated in a male batdic ttadition," were unable to "etase the importance of women" (37). In an especially effective move to clarify the politics and economics behind the utgency ofthe collecting and publishing ofballads, which, she holds, was often driven by a nostalgia fot an aristoctatic, wattiot past, she sets the peak ofcollection history in the context ofSit Waltet Scott's Tory sentiments. Emphasizing the differences between the collectot/singets, which were mosdy women, and collectot/publishets, which were latgely men, Symonds' revisionist scholarship gives het readets a histoty ofwomen singing to women about women, theit impossible loves and theit lives squeezed by povetty in tapidly changing social sttuctures. Symonds' subtle and finely articulated analysis allows her readers to see in the minutiae the complexity of...