282 NORDIC BALLADS

miners, fishers, raftsmen, artisans, and soldiers. Fully half the
repertoire consists of love-songs on the lips of women.

All these lyrics are danced as well as sung. 'A Polish song5, said
an eighteenth-century observer, * makes the whole world dance.'
Every genuine folk-song is a dance, and every dance a song. Lively
music quickens the feet; the notes of the bagpipe, shawm, and
fiddle are piercing and sprightly; and the rustic picture is com-
pleted by the swirling, colourful popular costumes. These are
elements added by the Poles themselves to the technique of
Germany, for their verses stand in close relationship to those of
Germany, and not to the danced 'viser' of Scandinavia. They are
generally quatrains or couplets, though more elaborate stanzas also
occur. The lines are tolerably regular and are assonated or rhymed;
but the assonances are so elusive and so simple that one might
doubt whether they constitute a principle of Polish prosody. There
is not much use of refrains, nor of triplets. The rhythms of the
dance-songs, especially in Galicia, are those which characterize
Ukrainian traditional verse, thanks to the powerful cultural in-
fluences which extended from Poland into Southern Russia from
the sixteenth century. Conversely, there is no free verse to corre-
spond to the indigenous 'dumi' of the Ukraine or to the Russian
'byliny'. The Polish folk-song, though Slavonic, belongs to the
occidental tradition.

Turning to the 'men's songs' (m^skie piesni), which, according
to Zaleski, 'describe events referring to the whole country or to
particular individuals', it is disconcerting to find among them some
which express frank dislike of the Poles. They are Ukrainian songs
dating from the great Cossack revolt. There are others which do
not concern Poland at all, but refer to Muscovite victories in
Turkish lands. Their evidence is of doubtful value in an attempt
to determine the age of Polish balladry, since so many of them are
not Polish but Ruthenian. For what it is worth, the evidence
points to a quite modern date. Chotim (Zaleski AA 3) refers to the
defeat inflicted on the Turks in 1739 by the Russians. A swiftly
moving ballad entitled Cossack Nyczaj (Zaleski AA i) tells how he
was surprised and captured by the Poles, then hanged and
quartered. It should probably be associated with the revolt of
1651, though there is no compelling reason to prefer that date to
another. The discomfiture of a certain Drewicz or Derewicz
(Zaleski AA 2), who was led in chains to Cracow, is in the more