The lyrics, based on the lives of Bellman's contemporaries in Gustavian-age Sweden, describe a gallery of fictional and semi-fictional characters and events in Stockholm.

The "soliloquy" of Epistle 23, a description of Fredman lying drunk in the gutter and then recovering in the Crawl-In Tavern, was described by Oscar Levertin as "the to-be-or-not-to-be of Swedish literature".

[4][5] They are populated by a lengthy cast of characters, and set firmly in Bellman's time and place, eighteenth century Stockholm, but are simultaneously decorated, for romantic or humorous effect, in Rococo style.

[1] Bellman was a skilful and entertaining performer of his songs, accompanying himself on the cittern, putting on different voices, and imitating the sounds made by a crowd of people.

(Alas, thou my mother), which has been described as "the to-be-or-not-to-be of Swedish literature", tells, in realist style, the story of a drunk who wakes in a Stockholm gutter outside the Crawl-In Tavern.

28, I går såg jag ditt barn, min Fröja (Yesterday I saw thy child, my Freya), tells the tale of an attempt to arrest the "nymph" Ulla Winblad, based on a real event.

Bellman here combines realism – Ulla wearing a black embroidered bodice, and losing her watch in a named street (Yxsmedsgränd) in Stockholm's Gamla stan – with images from classical mythology, such as a myrtle crown and an allusion to the goddess Aphrodite.

48, Solen glimmar blank och trind (The sun gleams smooth and round), narrates the relaxed and peaceful journey of a boat bringing Ulla Winblad home to Stockholm across Lake Mälaren on a lovely spring morning, after a night of carousing.

The boatmen call to each other, apparently haphazardly, but each detail helps to create a pastoral vision as "Gradually the wind blows up / In the fallen sails; / The pennant stretches, and with an oar / Olle stands on a hayboat;".

The musicologist James Massengale calls this "an impressive group, containing several of the [most] popular Bellman favorites of all time, as well as some of his most complex and intriguing works of art".

It imagines how Fredman, sitting on horseback outside Ulla's window at Fiskartorpet on a summer's day, invites her to come and dine with him on "reddest strawberries in milk and wine".

Flowers "of a thousand kinds" are all around; a stallion parades in a field "with his mare and foal"; a bull roars; a cockerel hops on the roof, and a magpie chatters.

)", a short crossing of the Stockholm waterway to Djurgården, is peopled with billowing waves, thunder, Venus, Neptune, tritons, postillions, angels, dolphins, zephyrs "and Paphos's whole might", as well as water-nymphs splashing about the "nymph" – in other words, Ulla Winblad.

Each of its twenty-one verses paints a picture of a moment in the peaceful journey, from the wind stirring the fallen sails, the skipper's daughter coming out of her cabin, the cockerel crowing, the church clock striking four in the morning, the sun glimmering on the calm water.

"[18] Britten Austin tempers his praise for Bellman's realism with the observation that the effects are chosen to work in song, rather than to be strictly correct or even possible.

"[19] It is the same with the meals, which would cause "terrible indigestion" if the listener actually had to eat them,[b] but "as a feast for mind, eye and ear they are highly satisfactory", the imagination filled with "all the poetic wealth" that Bellman provides.

[19] The literary historian Lars Warme observes that Bellman's sharp eye for detail has brought him praise for being the first Swedish realist, but at once balances this by saying that[20] his particular brand of 'realism' carries with it a heaping measure of pure fantasy, grotesque humor, and—not least—an elegant veneer of classical mythology.

The result is an "astonishing mixture of realism and wild mythological fantasy", set to complicated musical structures:[20] marches and contradances, operatic ariettes, and graceful minuets.

The final verse, containing all three metrical devices, is not, argues Massengale, an example of "decay", but shows Bellman's freedom, change of focus (from lament to acceptance), and the closure of the Epistle.

She notes Milman Parry's identification of the poetic formula, a metrical phrase for a particular idea, as the hallmark of improvised, orally composed, poetry; and that Bellman certainly had "regular usages" in the Epistles.

In contrast, a late one like Liksom en Herdinna, högtids klädd (Epistle 80) is evidently a "highly conscious literary composition" with "longer lines and a more relaxed rhyme pattern" which permits more complex content, in that case a rococo pastorale.

[26] She notes Anton Blanck [sv]'s identification of 1772 as the turning point,[27] from Bellman's early years in the relaxed 18th century frihetstiden to the Gustavian era's "poised rococo consciousness".

Like the English portrait painter, Bellman drew detailed pictures of his time in his songs, not so much of life at court as of ordinary people's everyday.

[4]Charles Wharton Stork commented in his 1917 anthology of Swedish verse that "The anthologist finds little to pause over until he comes to the poetry of Karl Mikael Bellman (1740–1795), but here he must linger long."

With them we witness the life of Stockholm : the world awakening at daybreak after rain, a funeral, a concert, a visit to a sick friend, and various idyllic excursions into the neighboring parks and villages.

But when one notes his dazzling mastery of form, his prodigal variety of meter and stanza, his ease and spontaneity, one is equally tempted to call him a virtuoso of lyric style.

The Orphei Drängar (Orpheus's farmhands) are a choir named for a phrase in Epistle 14, and set up to perform Bellman's works; they give concerts (of music by many composers) around the world.

[36] Several professional solo singers in the Swedish ballad tradition largely made their name in the 1960s singing Bellman, while accompanying themselves in Bellmanesque style with a guitar.

The Epistles have been translated, at least partially, into Danish, German, French, English, Russian, Polish, Finnish, Norwegian, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch, as shown below.

My renderings, therefore, may seem a trifle too antique in flavour; but to have jumbled up, as Bellman brilliantly does, modern-sounding slang with the graces of Rococo diction, would have produced a horrid effect.