Thoughts on Life: Selected Works of William Barnes: Dorsetshire's Unvictorian Nineteenth Century Poet

Written for VCU ENGL 322: Victorian Poetry

The assignment for this piece was to edit an anthology of works by a neglected Victorian poet. We were to include a cover letter expressing why we felt the anthology should be published, a table of contents listing the poems we wished to include in the anthology, an introduction to the anthology, and a list of further reading on the poet. Sorry the footnote links don't seem to work, but the numbers match up. And in case you want to learn more about him check out the William Barnes Society. Click the title to see the full text.

To whom it may concern,

This collection of William Barnes' poetry is some of the finest understated lyricism of the nineteenth century. Barnes is a poet of whom many, both in his day and in ours, are completely unaware. Perhaps this is because he does not quite fit into the standard canon of his day and age. Though he lived in the Victorian era, in many regards he had more in common with both the Elizabethans and the Romantics than with the typical Victorian poets. This makes him an excellent choice when trying to look outside of the accepted canon of poets like Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, etc. In addition to this he wrote prolifically, so there is ample material to make an anthology. I have been forced to sift out many of his poems, merely because there are too many to fit in one volume, unless that volume were to be of tremendous proportions. What made this sifting all the more difficult is that, while Barnes may not have written the most brilliant poems of the nineteenth century, he was by far one of the most consistent in quality. He may have lacked what Hopkins called “fire”, but what can you expect from a man who spent his entire life in the quiet countryside of Dorsetshire. What he lacks in fire, he easily makes up for in lyrical skill and ability to render an image or scene in the readers mind. All of this makes him an excellent choice to be the subject of an anthology on a neglected Victorian poet. He has most certainly been neglected, but it is due not to any lack of talent on his part. He just doesn't quite fit in with the other poets of his time, and that too makes him the perfect subject for such an anthology.

Selected Works of William Barnes:

Dorsetshire's Unvictorian Nineteenth Century Poet

Contents

Introduction

Orra: A Lapland Tale (1822)

From Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect (1844)
The Woodlands
Leädy-Day, an' Ridden House
Woodcom' Feäst
Evenèn in the Village
Maÿ
The White Road up athirt the Hill
The Shepherd o' the Farm
Woodley
Sleep did come wi' the Dew
Rivers don't gi'e Out
Hay-meäken
Hay-carren
Where we did keep our Flagon
The Sky a-Clearèn
The Evenèn Star o' Zummer
The Clote
I got two Vields
Be'mi'ster
The Ivy
Jenny out vrom Hwome
Night a-Zettèn In
Eclogue: The Common a-Took In
The Happy Days when I wer Young
The Carter
Lullaby
The Common a-Took In

From Poems partly of Rural Life (In National English) (1846)
Easter Bells
Rustic Childhood
Sonnet: Leaves
Whitburn's Green and White
The Lane
A Winter Night
Moss
Burncombe Hollow
Mary comes not to the Tree
Sonnet: To a Garden, on leaving it
Sonnet: Architecture

From Hwomely Rhymes: A Second Collection of Poems in the Dorset Dialect (1859)
My Orcha'd in Linden Lea
Day's Work a-Done
The Waggon a-Stooded
The Young the died in Beauty
Our Abode in Arby Wood
The Wold Wall
John Bleäke at Hwome at Night
Zun-zet
The Water Crowvoot
The Lilac
Wayfearen
The Leäne
The Railroad
Seats
Sound o' Water
Trees be Company
I know Who
Jessie Lee
True Love
The Beän Vield
The Wife a-Lost
Out at Plough
The Turn o' the Days
My Love's Guardian Angel
Leeburn Mill

From Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect, Third Collection (1862)
The Echo
Naïghbour Plaÿmeätes
The Two Churches
Woak Hill
The Hedger
In the Spring
Comen Hwome
The Rwose in the Dark
Zummer Winds
The Neäme Letters
The New House a-gettèn Wold
Zummer Stream
Eclogue: Come and Zee us in the Zummer
Lindenore
Treat Well your Wife
Hawthorn Down
Oben Vields
Times o' Year
To Me
Tweil
The Broken Heart
Evenèn Light
The Wheel Routs
Lizzie
Blessens a-Left
Fall Time
The Zilver-Weed
Zummer Thoughts in Winter Time
I'm out o' Door
A Snowy Night
The Year-Clock
The Humstrum
Heedless o' my Love
Don't Ceäre
Kindness
Daniel Dwithen, the Wise Chap
Turnèn Things Off
A Lot o' Maïdens a-runnèn the Vields
Good Night
Went Hwome

From Poems in the Dorset Dialect by the late Rev. W. Barnes (published 1906 written 1867)
The Wind at the Door
Winter a-Comen
Winter Weather
Clouds
The Broken Jug
Green
White an' Blue
The Little Hwomestead
The Mother's Dream
The Geäte a-Vallèn To

From Poems of Rural Life in Common English (1868)
The Mother's Dream
Melhill Feast
A Brisk Wind
Shellbrook
By the Mill in Spring
Sing again Together
Seasons Tokens
By Neighbours' Doors
Between Haymaking and Harvest
On the Road
The Knoll
Hill and Dell
The Shop of Meatware, or Wares to Eat
Air and Light
The Fireside Chairs
Black and White
Bed-ridden
Plorata Veris Lacrimis
Do Good

From A Selection from Unpublished Poems by the Rev. W. Barnes (1870)
Musings
Flowers a-Field
Cliffwood
Arise, O Winds!
Time Steals Away
Proud of his Home
How Great Become
The Rooks

Further Reading

Introduction

When, in 1886, William Barnes passed away, Coventry Patmore wrote of him that “he [had] done a small thing well, while his contemporaries have mostly been engaged in doing big things ill”.[1] This sums up both Barnes' life and his literary works. Although the length of his life was not particularly small. He was born in 1800 on what he called a “farmling”[2] in the Vale of Blackmore in Dorsetshire. Spending the majority of his eighty-six years in Dorsetshire, he lived for a brief period at Mere in neighboring Wiltshire. In that time he studied languages, wrote poetry, and in general enjoyed a quiet life of obscurity. It was not until he was close to sixty that he began to gain any sort of real attention from Victorian literary circles. But when they did discover his work, many of the poets who are now canonized as the greats of the Victorian era thought him to be a brilliant wordsmith. Gerard Manley Hopkins called him “a perfect artist and of a most spontaneous inspiration”.[3]

This praise however did little to change his obscurity. Following his death his daughter wrote a biography of him which sold a whopping 267 copies. Part of this obscurity is no doubt due to Barnes himself. He was happy with his quiet rural life. Thomas Hardy said of him that “he entirely leaves alone ambition [and] pride”.[4] A sentiment that while aimed at his poetical works, reflects the man himself as well. He most likely did not even think of himself as a poet in the sense that many of his contemporaries did, let alone a poet worthy of critical acclaim. For Barnes writing poetry was “refreshment of the mind from care or irksomeness”.[5] This sentiment is reflected in the almost sublime joy which shows through in many of his poems. Perhaps because of his obscurity and isolation his poetry is unlike that of any other Victorian poets, with the possible exception of the later poets Hopkins and Hardy, who both found great inspiration in his work. Hardy, who was also a native of Dorsetshire, even wrote several poems in the Dorset dialect, a trademark of much of Barnes' work.

Barnes considered himself a “lingual conservative”.[6] Though he had great respect for other languages, and knew quite a few, he disapproved of the mixing pot which standard English was becoming, calling it a mongrel language. In his opinion each language should be kept distinct from one another. This does not mean that he thought English to be better than other languages; he wrote his personal journal in Italian. He did however wish for English to be more “self-enriching”.[7] He did not see the need for introducing new words with roots in Latin or Greek, when there were perfectly good roots and stems to be found in English. And he did not make these claims hypocritically. Throughout his writing, both poetic and prosaic, he used words with non-English roots as sparingly as possible, preferring to coin new terms rooted in English such as fore-say for preface, quicken for accelerate, and end-case for accusative.[8] This preference for what he called a “purer” English based off of “Saxon-English and other teutonic tongues”[9] reflects a somewhat populist bent in his ideology. He saw the problem as stemming from the fact that Latin and Greek were favored over English in English universities and schools. This meant that the Latinized standard English did not reflect the English people as a whole, but rather just the scholarly segment of the population. In the “fore-say” to his book An Outline of English Speech-Craft he says “speech was shapen of the breath-sounds of speakers, for the ears of hearers, and not from speech-tokens (letters) in books”.

This sentiment is apparent upon even a cursory reading of any of his poems, but especially those in the Dorset dialect. Barnes intimately understood how words sound and how those sounds affect a reader or “hearer”. In elements of form, rather than wording, he was much more inclined to borrow from other languages. From the Persian poets of the middle ages he gained what he called “full-matching”, a form of punning which pairs similar sounding strings of words that have different meanings. An example of this can be found in “The Wold Wall”: “Ah! well-a-dae! O wall adieu”. He also took a form called adorning “in which every word of a line is answered by another of the same measure and rhyme in the other line of the distich”, as exemplified by the lines “As trees be bright / Wi' bees in flight” from “Out at Plough”. From Hebrew poetry he learned a form of parallelism as in “Evening by evening moon by moon” from “Melhill Feast”. In the works of Homer he saw a model of the use of epithets that he strived to emulate. But of course the languages that he learned the most from were those that were nearest at hand: the Celtic languages of Irish and Welsh as well as Anglo-Saxon and his own native English. From Irish he took “union” or under-riming, which is riming the end sound of a line with a middle sound in the next. An example of this can be found in “Times o' Year”: “Here did swäy the eltrot flow'rs / When the hours o' night wer vew”. Verse of the Celtic languages and that of old Anglo-Saxon favors heavy use of alliteration of consonant sounds. The Welsh term cynghanedd refers to the repetition of consonantal sounds in the first and second halves of a line separated by a caesura in the middle. This is very similar to the Anglo-Saxon form of alliterative verse that matches three of the four stressed consonantal sounds in a line. The line “Do leän down low in Linden Lea” from “My Orcha'd in Linden Lea” is an excellent demonstration of Barnes' use of cynghanedd.

Barnes may have been willing to borrow some elements of form from other languages, but he maintained a great respect for the lyrical forms of the English language as well. Unlike many of his contemporaries who looked at the lyric poets of the Elizabethan era and saw ideas and attitudes, Barnes saw elaborate and virtuosic use of language. For him ideas were unimportant. What truly mattered was how those ideas were expressed. Form was the true test of good poetry. Barnes admired “skill that conceals skill,” lines that “keep all the straight rules of verse, yet flow as freely as if they were wholly untied”.[10] This is apparent in his dialectic poetry which on the whole gives a feel of being spoken offhand by someone from Dorsetshire, but when examined closely shows exquisite attention to detail. Coventry Patmore commented that “there is absolutely no finery in Barnes's poetry, and that often there is not a single line worth remembering in what is, nevertheless, upon the whole a very memorable poem”.[11]

While fitness of form was of utmost importance to Barnes, he did not entirely neglect the other aspects of poetry. He was obsessed with the idea of harmony, both in the context of his own life in Dorsetshire and in the context of his poetry. In a piece he wrote for Macmillan's Magazine entitled “Thoughts on Beauty and Art” he expressed the opinion that nature contained the highest form of beauty and that “the beautiful in art is the result of an unmistaken working of man in accordance with the beautiful in nature”. Not all nature was beauty, but the utmost beauty could be found in nature. This was “the unmarred result of God's first creative or forming will”. This idea of beauty was to him the essence of good art and good poetry.

It is easy then to understand why so much of his work focuses on nature and the rural life of living in harmony with nature. Unlike much of the rest of Victorian society which saw life as an anxious struggle against unfavorable seas, Barnes saw no real reason to struggle. While a majority of Victorian poets dealt with complex issues, full of doubt and questioning, Barnes merely accepted the world and recorded it in poem form. As Patmore said, he “in his poems is nothing but a poet”.[12] Thus his poems are more like snapshots that capture the beauty in nature and life. What dissatisfaction there is to be found in his work comes not from within, as much of Victorian poetry does, nor from the natural world, but rather from the lack of harmony between fallen man and nature. In poems like “The Leäne” he bemoans the fact that Victorian society was “blockèn up” the natural order of things. But he does so in a very subtle fashion, merely questioning why there was no longer a strip of grass of the side of the lanes. By using this simple example and looking at it from a variety of different standpoints including that of the foot-weary traveler, the small farmer, and the parent he is able to make a very sound case against the inharmonious Victorian industrialized attitude towards nature and land.

In this way Barnes was struggling somewhat, struggling to preserve the way of life that he and many others enjoyed in rural Dorsetshire and all across rural nineteenth century England. He was fighting, in a poetical sense of the word, against the self proclaimed cultivation and refinement of industrialized Victorian society. He may not have written such harshly critical poetry as the likes of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but he did see the increasing power and control of monopolies as infringements on the freedom and welfare of the laborers. In his book Views on Labour and Gold he makes the analogy that “the kindness which is done by capital when it affords employment to people from whom, by a monopoly, it has taken their little business, is such as one might do to a cock by adorning his head with a plume made of feathers pulled out of its own tail”. On the origins of poetry as well his views were those of a populist. Poetry and verse did not develop out of any form of sophistication or refinement in society, but rather from human speech acting in harmony with the beauty of nature. “To a bookless and unwriting people,” he said, “verse is rather a need that a joy”.[13]

In an era of elegantly elongated and elaborate literature, William Barnes walked a poetic path distinctly his own. He refrained from the fanciful veneer that so many of his contemporaries used to hide a lack of depth, and instead embraced the simple in a way that created its own depth, its own sophistication. His poems mainly describe everyday aspects of rural life, but they are in no way mundane. The amazing attention to detail and form that he puts into them is belied by their casual and off-hand feel. But that is no surprise, considering his personal views on beauty and harmony in poetry, and the many years of his life spent refining his lyrical skills to match those views. And he really does seem to have achieved, in much of his work, this fitness of form that he so strived for in his poetry. As Hopkins commented “it is as if Dorset life and Dorset landscape had taken flesh and tongue in the man,”[14] and that is something that could only be achieved by someone who truly was in harmony with his world, with Dorsetshire.

[1] Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore

[2] From an unpublished autobiographical manuscript Notes on the Life of William Barnes

[3] The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges

[4] “The Rev. William Barnes, B.D.” Athenaeum

[5] Notes on the Life of William Barnes

[6] “A Letter on the Formation of the English Language” Gentleman's Magazine

[7] “A Letter on the Formation of the English Language” Gentleman's Magazine

[8] An Outline of English Speech-Craft

[9] Early England and the Saxon English

[10] “The Old Bardic Poetry” Macmillan's Magazine

[11] “William Barnes, the Dorsetshire Poet” Macmillan's Magazine

[12] “William Barnes, the Dorsetshire Poet” Macmillan's Magazine

[13] “The Old Bardic Poetry” Macmillan's Magazine

[14] The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges

Thoughts on Life

Selected Works of William Barnes: Dorsetshire's Unvictorian Nineteenth Century Poet

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