Forgotten Ground Regained

I Find the Naiad's Place, and Mine

My home was here, the place that I held,claimed by right of my hand.Of each copse, creek and crest I surveyed,none were beyond my command.
Donning my denim armor one dayand my sharp-edged blade of steel,I started my rounds but my steed was stoppedwhere a swamp ensnared its wheels.
Forging on foot, I found my waythrough the cattails and tangled brush.By hacking and slashing, my slow assaultcame to a clearing too lush.
Grasses too green? Water that gurgled,cool without quenching my thirst?I would rather no respite or rest, compelledto find the source of it first.
So I sallied upstream to search its course,slipping on moss-covered rock.My blade and its bite went bootless therewhen mosquitoes swarmed amok.
Drenched, bedraggled, but drawn on aheadas I followed the run of that brook,I’d go where its gurgles grew into song.It beckoned, or maybe it took.
At the foot of a hill I beheld its head,and approached with care from below.A sprite in a spring appeared at the source!Watercress draped her flow.
The laurel hedges that hid her homefailed to hide her grace.As she dallied and danced her dance for me,I was transfixed by her face.
I stood there stunned, then sank to my knees,dreading that holy maid.I prayed she’d pardon a trespassing pestfor the breach of her sylvan glade.
To silence my babble, she softly spokeof a way she might be pleased:"This place and its fields were my fief before,mine are the lands you seized."
"You, my tenant pro tem may attend,serving and guarding my needs.In turn, I will bless your biting bladeand release your metal steed."
A prize from my pockets would seal our pact;an offering made, of sorts.From the bed of the brook I’d brought some jewels,pieces of milky quartz.
She took them and nodded, that nameless nymph;it was time to leave her there.Steps in return were simpler and swift,forgetting the how and where.
Was it a dream – all daring and dance?Detail fades and blurs.I had held my home and behest as my own,but I and they are hers.
Editor’s NoteThis is an alliterative ballad. That is, it combines systematic alliteration with a version of ballad meter (alternate tetrameter/trimeter lines, rhyming on the 2nd and 4th lines of each 4-line stanza.) For the purposes of comparison, check out other alliterative ballads like Kipling’s Quaeritur. This is not, however, a literary ballad. It is a folk ballad, filled with echoes of older English rhythms. The result has something of the feel (though not the meter) of Icelandic rimur, which also deploy alliterative lines in rhyming stanzas – see, for instance, Jonas Hallgrimsson’s Lay of Hulda. The rhythm is fundamentally accentual -- strong stresses are counted, but the number of unstressed syllables varies. The first and third lines of each stanza can be analyzed as traditional long lines (paired half-lines joined by strong-stress alliteration). The second and fourth lines sometimes alliterate, but they always rhyme. Where the alliteration is most consistent, as in the following stanza, the poem approximates one of the traditional Old Norse meters -- ljóðaháttr, or chant meter, which may in fact be one of the historical sources from which folk ballads derived. Grasses too green? Water that gurgled,cool without quenching my thirst?I would rather no respite or rest, compelledto find the source of it first.
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