Fresh Water Spring
The Poems of William Barnes. Edited by Ber- nard Jones. (Centaur Press, two vols., 8 gns.)
'DEAR old Barnes,' Coventry Patmore wrote to Edmund Gosse in September, 1886. 'He has done a small thing well, while his contem- poraries have been mostly engaged in doing big
things A month later the old man, at that time rector of Winterborne Came, died in his sleep. Hardy, who had been living nearby in his new house at Max Gate for just over a year, walked across the fields to the funeral. As the procession left the rectory, the name-plate on the coffin flashed like a heliograph in the sun: as it still shines in Hardy's 'The Last Signal.'
Hardy's association with Barnes had been a tong one, and it was the younger poet who in 1908 produced a selection of Barnes's poems, `to the best of my judgment, the greater part of that which is of the highest value. . . .' His selection represented a mere sixth of Barnes's total output. Geoffrey Grigson's Selected Poems of William Barnes (1950) remains the best short introduction to Barnes: excellently documented, though still containing only about one-fifth of Barnes's work.
The appearance of Mr. Bernard Jones's two- volume The Poems of William Barnes is a major event in English poetry. With the exception of a few rhymes and jingles (the translations are planned to appear as a separate volume) this is in effect the first collected edition. It contains well over 800 poems, clearly printed and anno- tated, a Dorset word list (this has to be con- sulted much less than one might imagine) and, irritatingly, no alphabetical index of titles, though there are twenty-two pages of first lines. For such a monumental edition, Mr. Jones's intro- duction may at first seem rather inadequate; but we are reminded that this collection forms only the first part of a complete study of Barnes's life and work. As it is, the poems may perhaps be read in conjunction with Giles Dugdale's sym- pathetically written William Barnes of Dorset (1953). One photograph to each of Mr. Jones's volumes seems rather short supply: though the portrait of 1852 reveals, interestingly enough, the poet's keen, shrewd, humorous face not yet screened by a dense fuzz of white silk hair.
Barnes's poems have a unity which very properly almost defies and defeats mere quota- tion. The limpid style, in which the words fall with delicious inevitability, conceals as gently as brilliantly the firm bone of their construc- tion. Whether or not the language is 'national' English or the Dorset dialect, the result, more often than not, is pure poetry, as in: It was a chilly winter's night: And frost was glitfring on the ground, And evening stars were twinkling bright; And from the gloomy plain around Came no sound, But where, within the wood-girt tow'r, The churchbell slowly struck the hour or in this, from 'Ellen Brine ov Allenburn':
The last time I'd a-cast my zight
Upon her feace, a-feaded white, Wer in a zummer's mornen light In hall avore the smwold'ren vier, The while the children beat the vloor, In play, wi' tiny shoes they wore, An' call'd their mother's eyes to view The feats their little limbs could do. Oh! Ellen Brine ov Allenburn, They childem now mus' mum.
Barnes called himself a 'lingual conservative,' strove to purify English by allowing it to draw on itself rather than on what he felt were alien and intrusive tongues, and his experiments with language fascinated, among others, Gerard Man- ley Hopkins. To reread Barnes today is to be refreshed as from a well of crystal water. Barnes wrote, like all good poets, not what he chose to write, but what chose to be written. His apparent indifference to early-nineteenth- century social conditions is now at least par- tially dispelled by the inclusion of his eclogues of the 1830s, brought together here for the first time. He knew well the immediate effects of the Poor Law of 1834, in which outdoor relief was cut and the only way for the destitute to get help was by entering the workhouse, or `bastille': a place of no beer, no talk at meals, and the sharpest of segregation.
Thal tiake an' put en up into a cart, An' car en out o' parish like a thief,
An' shove en in to bed an' tiable Amang a house vull o' fresh hazes, Wi' scores o' yolk vrom fifty pliazes Like hosses in a common stiable. . . .
This rewarding edition reveals Barnes, once and for all, in his richness and variety. He rarelY left Dorset, and never travelled farther in Eurone than Dieppe. As with all poets, his true auto.- biography is to be found not in his prose. hut,111 his verse, and the native strength and veracitY of its composition reminds one of the story of an old vicar of Fordington in the earlY 1800s. A new priest was faced with a christening, and complained to the clerk that there was no water in the font. 'Water, sir!' replied the clerk, astounded. The last parson never used no water. He spit into his hand.'
Spit, as every countryman knows, is the ancient charm against the devil and the dark. So is poetry; and not least among the work of English poets that of William Barnes, to whom this splendid collection at last does justice.
CHARLES CAUSLEY
Previous page
