A gracious Queen his Sonnets did commend,
And some great Lord, one Temple, was his Friend.
That Lord was pleas’d this Holiday to make,
And feast the Threshers for that Thresher’s sake.’”
A hundred years were to pass before a countryman came to do something of what Duck left undone, but, however honestly, did it from the point of view of a spectator, a clergyman, a schoolmaster, an archæologist, a reader of Tennyson, and the refined contemplators of rural life. He lived and died in a country of which most of the conditions are to be paralleled on Salisbury Plain and the Pewsey Vale. I mean William Barnes.
Dorset is a county of chalk hills divided by broad valleys and, in particular, by the valleys of the Stour and the Frome. William Barnes is the poet of the valleys, the elm and not the beech being his favourite tree. In the first year of last century he was born in Blackmoor Vale, which is watered by a tributary of the Stour: at his death, only fourteen years from the century’s end, he was rector of Came, which is in the valley of the Frome. The son of a Dorset farmer, and for most of his life a schoolmaster or clergyman within the county, the Dorset dialect was his mother tongue, his “only true speech.” He wrote of Dorset, and for Dorset, and strangers, perhaps natives also, might say that the man was Dorset. His poems are full of the names and the aspects of its towns and villages, its rivers and brooks, and the hills that lie around its great central height of Bulbarrow, which is mid-way between the homes of his childhood and old age.
In his “Praise o’ Dorset” the poet is very modest, with a kind of humorous modesty, about the county. Though we may be homely, is the beginning, we are not ashamed to own our place; we have some women “not uncomely,” and so on. Homeliness, in fact, is characteristic of Barnes and of his Dorset. He became in some ways a learned man, but when he wrote in his mother tongue and from the heart, he was the Dorset farmer’s son and nothing else. From the humble homeliness of his work he might have been a labourer, and he did more or less deliberately make himself the mouth-piece of the Dorset carters, cowmen, mowers, and harvesters. These songs, narratives, and dialogues bring forward the men at their labours, walking with their club flags to church, singing the songs of Christmas or Harvest Home. Here they court, wed, grow old together, build a new house, or return with money saved to their “poor fore-fathers’ plot o’ land.” He celebrates the horses, Smiler, Violet, Whitefoot, Jack, and “the great old wagon uncle had.” Separate poems are given to notable trees—“the great oak tree that’s in the dell,” the cottage lilac tree, the solitary may tree by the pond, an aspen by the river at Pentridge, the great elm in the little home-field and its fall. “Trees be Company” is the title of one of his poems.
Many of his best passages are about old houses, with hearths “hallowed by times o’ zitten round,” and fires that made the heart gay in storm or winter, and some of them, like “the great old house of mossy stone,” with memories of stately ladies that once did use
“To walk wi’ hoops an’ high-heel shoes”