A hoarse voice rises in the evening street, and the speaker winces before the words are even clear. In "Ballade of a Special Edition," Amy Levy turns a familiar city nuisance, the seller of a late newspaper edition, into a small comic horror story. What he carries is less paper than appetite: for hangings, shipwrecks and railway smashes, the bloodier the better. The poem's central idea is that sensational news is a trade in other people's suffering, and that the trade is so hungry it will invent what the world fails to supply.
The imagery sets this up at once. The seller is a "Bird of ill omen, flapping wide / The pinion of a printed sheet," so the newspaper becomes a wing and the man a scavenger. His "hoarse note scares the eventide," shattering the quiet of the evening. He is called both "herald" and "friend" of "slaughter, theft, and suicide," and the pairing is deliciously ironic. A herald announces grand events, but this one is on easy terms with death. In the second stanza, "A hanging to his soul is sweet," and "sweet" is the shocking word. Ships become "human-freighted vessels," as though passengers were only cargo, which is how a headline-hunter might see them. His "gloating fancy" lingers where "misdirected trains collide," imagining wreckage with relish.
The third stanza turns the satire into a joke. He loves war, "victory or defeat, / So there be loss on either side," and his grief is entirely professional. Then comes the neat reversal: "Since no distinguished man has died, / And since the Fates, relenting, send / No great catastrophe," he must settle for less. The Fates' mercy is his bad luck. When his "tale of horrors" is "incomplete," "Imagination's aid is tried." In other words, he makes things up. The verb "spied," used of the double murder, makes his find sound small and scavenging.
The form does a lot of the work. A ballade, a medieval French form, here has three eight-line stanzas and a four-line closing envoi. Each stanza ends on the same refrain, "A double murder in Mile End," and Mile End, a district of East London, roots the cry in real city streets. The rhyme scheme is tightly controlled, with only three rhyme sounds per stanza, and the *-ide* rhyme returns in every stanza (wide, eventide, suicide, pride; bide, collide, supplied, cried; side, tried, died, spied). The brisk iambic tetrameter ("He COMES; I HEAR him UP the STREET") has a marching, patter-like bounce. The compulsory repetition of the form mimics the street cry itself, which comes round again whether we want it or not. The poem even admits this: "How often have we heard it cried." The "we" quietly includes the reader among the audience the vendor depends on.
Small changes in the refrain also tell a story. In the first stanza it ends with an exclamation mark, fresh and loud. In the second it has a full stop, as the cry settles into routine. In the third it becomes "This double murder," pointed out as his hard-won discovery. In the envoi it turns accusing: "Your double murder." Traditionally an envoi addresses a prince or patron, but Levy addresses the newsman: "Fiend, get thee gone!" The grand, almost stage-Gothic language is funny, and judging by the tone, the speaker's own diction has swelled to the melodrama she is rejecting, which gives the poem a self-aware wink.
The last insult is the sharpest. "It is apocryphal, you cheat." Calling the story doubtful matters more than calling him cruel. He profits from death, and he may not even have the death. The poem is significant because it packs a whole critique of sensational journalism into a form that is usually polite and artful. Its question, whether we are buying news or just buying a shudder, is one readers can still ask whenever an alarming headline arrives.