Mothers who kill their children go to hell — or so the old folk songs insisted, back when we had a clearer sense of monstrous people and their fate. In The New York Sun’s Poem of the Day feature, we seem to have neglected a little the ballad tradition: the enormous corpus of older English verse, some medieval but most from the 16th and 17th centuries. The Victorians invented a cottage industry of gathering these songs, reaching a peak with Francis James Child’s seminal collection, “The English and Scottish Popular Ballads,” in five volumes (1882–1898).

“The Cruel Mother” is the 20th ballad in Child’s collection. The first known printing of any version was in David Herd’s “Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs” (1776), and Child found 16 different versions of the lyrics. Later collectors have added at least 300 more versions and perhaps a hundred different melodies. What they all have in common, however, is a woman who has an illicit affair and murders the resulting children after their birth. A particularly sharp version, often called something like “The Greenwood Side,” reduces the story to its moral archetypes: “She leaned her back against an oak. / First it bend, and then it broke.” Good early 1960s performances, in the midst of the Folk Music boom, include those by Ian and Sylvia and Peggy Seeger.

“The Greenwood Side” is a spooky and powerful rendition of the old moral sense that the universe itself recoils from murder: “She wiped the blade against her shoe. / The more she rubbed the redder it grew.” And the ghosts of the dead children rightly appear at the end to condemn their cruel mother.

The Greenwood Side (“The Cruel Mother”) 
by Anonymous

There was a lady lived in York
            On-a-lee an lonee
Fell in love with her father’s clerk.
            Down by the Greenwood Sidie-o

She loved him up, she loved him down,
Loved him ’til he filled her arms.

She leaned her back against an oak.
First it bend, and then it broke.

She leaned her back against a thorn.
There she had two fine babes born.

She took out her wee pen knife.
There shе took those sweet babes’ life.

She wiped the blade against her shoe.
The more she rubbed the redder it grew.

She went back to her father’s hall.
Saw two babes a-playin’ at ball.

Oh, babes! Oh, babes! If you were mine
I’d dress you up in scarlet fine.

Oh, Mother! Oh, Mother! When we were yours
Scarlet was our own heart’s blood.

Oh, babes! Oh, babes! It’s Heaven for you.
            On-a-lee an lonee
Mother! Oh, Mother! It’s Hell for you.
            Down by the Greenwood Sidie-o

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.