What is your take on The Wife Of Usher's Well?

Question

Do you find this ballad eerie? What is the main feeling it leaves you with? I am talking about the traditional ballad, not any remade fold song version.

It seems a little bit haunting to me, maybe macabre, like the view of death for this time period. Just interested in everyone's input.

Hmm. Apparently no one actually reads literature at Yahoo Answers. They must be too busy asking questions about farts and sex.

Answer 1

That one always seemed to me to be a fairly typical ghost story... there are lots and lots of them from the period.

I find a study of many of the death superstitions to be just as curious - it was not uncommon for a household to nail their doors shut and enter and leave their houses through the windows so the dead wouldn't be able to figure out how to get back inside. Much of the general fear of the dead seems to center around the idea that if the spirits of the dead show up, they may very well take the living back with them.

Nor is this latter idea too strange, given diseases of the era. How else to explain that one death can lead to others, even though there has only been casual contact? But maybe that's all beside the point.

One cannot help but feel, I think, that it may well have been verses such as this that inspired better-known tales such as "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and some of Poe's stories...

PS: I hate the re-made stuff too!

Answer 2

Yeah I agree with Secret . This girl must be " untouchable " if you know what I mean . Maybe she is one of those really fat women . she does sound miserable .

HEY ! YOU TYPE LIKE A FAT CHICK !!!!