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Tower and Town, October 1986


William Barnes, Parson Poet

He has done a small thing well, while his contemporaries have mostly been engaged in doing big things ill. That was Coventry Patmore's epitaph on the Dorset parson-poet, William Barnes, the centenary of whose death occurs this month.

He was born in 1801, one of the many children of a tenant farmer in the Blackmore Vale. He grew up, then, surrounded by the Dorset countryside and went to a little dame school. He was taken on in a solicitor's office in Sturminster Newton as a solicitor's clerk. Soon after, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, he fell in love with a girl of sixteen, and the two of them were eventually married.

Barnes was one of those people it is impossible to stop learning. Early on he developed gifts for language, literature, art, music and the classics. He taught himself Anglo-Saxon, Welsh, French, Italian, Persian, Russian, Hebrew and Hindustani. Before his marriage, he launched himself into a new career as schoolmaster over the Wiltshire border at Mere.

But Barnes's great love was the Dorset dialect. His poetry is written in a thick version of Dorset dialect and in phonetic spelling. This has helped to keep its beauties hidden, and has resulted in Barnes being less well-known than he might otherwise have been. Much of it was based on the countryside and people he knew and it is full of the sadness and misery of ordinary people at the time. He even translated The Song of Solomon into Dorset.

In 1847 he was ordained and took his title at Whitcombe near Dorchester. In 1850 he took a Cambridge divinity degree, quite an achievement for a self-educated forty-nine year old!

Eleven years later he gave up his school-teaching and became rector of Winterbome Came, where he remained for the rest of his life.

It was then that he adopted the rather eccentric dress of caped coat, knee breeches and buckled shoes, topped by a wide brimmed hat. Thus dressed, he was a familiar figure walking down the middle of the street in Dorchester on market days with a leather satchel and stout staff and followed by his little grey dog. His statue stands in St Peter's churchyard in Dorchester.

He was much loved by his parishioners, trudging out to visit them in all weathers until the end of his life. He died on 7 October 1886 and lies buried in the churchyard at Winterborne Came.

Whitcombe church, now vested in the Redundant Churches Fund, is the venue for a service marking the centenary at 2 pm on Sunday 5 October.

LINDEN LEA

'thin the woodlands, flow'ry gleaded,
By the woak tree's mossy foot,
The sheenen grass-bleades, timber-sheaded,
Now do quiver under voot:
An' birds do whissle auver head,
An' water's bubblen in its bed,
An' there vor me the apple tree
Do lean down low in Linden Lea.

When leaves that leatley wer a-springen
Now do feade 'ithin the copse,
An' painted birds do hush their zingen
Up upon the timber's tops:
An' brown-leav'd fruit's a-turnen red,
In cloudless zunsheen, auver head,
Wi' fruit vor me, the apple tree
Do lean down low in Lindin Lea.

Let other vo'k meake money vaster
In the air o'dark-room'd towns,
I don't dread a peevish measter:
Though noo man do heed my fr
I be free to goo abrode
Or teake agean my hwomeward
To where, vor me, the apple tre
Do lean down low in Linden Le

Keith Hugo

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