Read quickly, "Ballad of Women I Love" sounds like a gentleman's tribute to a circle of cherished ladies: Prudence Mears, Amandy Baker, Dorothy Pratt, Marthy Stone, Hepsy Higgins, Dorcas Eastman. Read slowly, you notice that not one of them is described. We learn nothing about their faces, voices or characters. We learn about their belongings: an old blue plate hidden in an oaken chest, a platter with a crest, a cut-glass pitcher, a teapot. The joke at the heart of Eugene Field's poem is that the speaker's "love" is a collector's hunger, and the women are simply the keepers of the treasure.
The refrain carries the joke. Every stanza ends on "These do I love, and these alone," and each time the line means something slightly different. In the first stanza it sounds like a sincere, even sentimental, confession, muttered "in an undertone." In the second it arrives after a mock-offended question, "Think ye now that I say in jest?", which is exactly what a man who is joking would ask. By the third, the speaker admits he has been giving reasons all along: "You can see why I say with such certain zest." The reason turns out to be "ware I'd like to own." The word "these" never says whether it points to the women or to their china, and the poem profits from that ambiguity.
The construction is as tidy as the shelves it describes. Each stanza has eight lines rhymed ababbcbc, and the pattern repeats exactly three times. The b-rhyme is always -est: "chest," "crest," "guest," "confessed," then "blest," "pressed," "possessed," "jest," then "invest," "Quest," "rest," "zest." That is twelve rhymes on one sound, which is a showy feat, and the final c-rhyme always lands on "alone," with "undertone," "Stone" and "own" leading up to it. This three-stanza, repeating-refrain design resembles the French ballade, which suits the title, though the poem has no short closing stanza of the kind ballades often add. The rhythm is a loose, bouncing four-beat line. It is not rigidly regular, and that keeps the tone of a cheerful chat rather than a solemn lyric.
The diction is a joke in itself. "Hath," "Beareth," "What times soever" and "Think ye" are mock-antique, as if the language had been dug out of the same oaken chest as the plate. Against that, Field sets the speech of the countryside: "Says I to myself," and names spelled as people say them, "Amandy," "Marthy," "Hepsy." The effect is warm and a little teasing. The objects are carefully chosen too. A "Franklin platter" and a "Washington teapot" suggest, judging by their names, ware honoring national heroes. The "relic of art and a land effete" seems to come from an exhausted old country. And the pitcher "of glass that's cut, not pressed" shows that the speaker knows his stuff. His affection may be comic, but his expertise is real.
The third stanza is the cleverest, because it turns the language of courtship into the language of money. If Hepsy or Dorcas were "prone to invest / In Cupid's bonds," the word "invest" and the financial "bonds" hint that this romance is also a transaction. The speaker calls himself "the bootless bard of Crockery Quest." "Bootless" means unprofitable or getting nowhere, and "Quest" gives a mock-heroic air to what is really a shopping trip. He half-offers himself as a husband, but his eyes are on the "heaps of trumpery." That word usually means showy rubbish, and it sits oddly beside his longing. It may be a collector's bluff, a pretense that the prize is not worth much while he plots to get it.
The poem is slight, but it is well made, and its pleasures are specific. It shows how a repeated line can gather new meaning as the stanzas pile up, and it treats everyday household objects as things worth wanting. The laugh is gentle, too. The women are never sneered at, and the real target is the speaker, a poet so smitten with old crockery that he cannot even court honestly.