Download Ban and Arriere Ban by Andrew Lang. An 1894 collection of fugitive rhymes, literary ballades, historical poems, comic verses, translations, and occasional poetry. Available in PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and AZW3 formats.
About Ban and Arriere Ban
Ban and Arriere Ban by Andrew Lang is an 1894 collection of poems and occasional verses, subtitled A Rally of Fugitive Rhymes. Bringing together literary ballades, historical pieces, translations, comic verses, dedications, and poems first scattered through magazines and other publications, the volume shows Lang’s range as a late Victorian poet, critic, classicist, humourist, and man of letters.
Why Read Ban and Arriere Ban?
In Ban and Arriere Ban, Andrew Lang gathers scattered poems back into company: historical ballads, literary tributes, playful verses, translations, and rhymes written for friends, books, occasions, and magazines.
Ban and Arriere Ban is an excellent choice for readers interested in Andrew Lang beyond the famous Colour Fairy Books. Published in 1894 and subtitled A Rally of Fugitive Rhymes, the volume presents Lang as a poet of wit, learning, nostalgia, literary friendship, and historical imagination. Its title suggests a calling together of dispersed forces, and the book does exactly that: it rallies poems that had appeared in magazines, commendatory verses, translations, occasional pieces, and earlier poetic settings.
The collection ranges widely. Lang writes on Jeanne d’Arc, King James, Prince Charles, Omar Khayyam, Æsop, Calais Sands, Yule, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Wordsworthian influence, golf, difficult rhymes, and literary memory. This variety reflects the breadth of his interests as a critic, folklorist, classical scholar, journalist, and poet. The poems are not arranged as a single narrative, but as a cabinet of literary moods and occasions.
Lang’s verse is often playful, allusive, and self-aware. He delights in literary forms such as the ballade, in echoes of older poetry, and in the social life of books and writers. At the same time, the collection includes notes of affection, loss, remembrance, and historical melancholy, giving the lighter pieces a deeper background of friendship and cultural memory.
The book is especially useful for readers who know Lang primarily as a collector of fairy tales. Here, his poetic voice reveals many of the same qualities that shaped his anthologies: love of old stories, sensitivity to tradition, pleasure in formal pattern, and a lively connection between scholarship and imagination. The poems show a writer moving easily between humour, history, translation, homage, and personal feeling.
Readers who enjoyed Lang’s Ballades and Verses Vain, Ballads in Blue China, and Verses and Translations, Grass of Parnassus, or New Collected Rhymes will find Ban and Arriere Ban a natural companion, rich in late Victorian literary culture, elegant rhyming, learned humour, and affectionate poetic remembrance.
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| Book | Author |
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| Ballades and Verses Vain | Lang AndrewAndrew Lang |
| Ballads in Blue China, and Verses and Translations | Lang AndrewAndrew Lang |
| Grass of Parnassus | Lang AndrewAndrew Lang |
| New Collected Rhymes | Lang AndrewAndrew Lang |
