No Dialect Please, You're a Poet

English Dialect in Poetry in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Claire Hélie, Elise Brault-Dreux, Emilie Loriaux, Claire Hélie, Elise Brault-Dreux, Emilie Loriaux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367258047
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000124200
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Literature

No Dialect Please, You're a Poet is situated at the crossroads in research areas of literature and linguistics. This collection of essays brings to the forefront the many ways in which dialect is present in poetry and how it is realized in both written texts and oral performances. In examining works from a wide range of poets and poetries, from acclaimed poets to emerging ones, this book offers a comprehensive introduction to poetics of dialects from a variety of regions, across two centuries of English poetry.

Part I
Rooting Dialects in Late 19th-Century Poetry

1
Foundations of English Dialect Poetry

Alan Chedzoy

On January 9, 1834, readers of the Dorset County Chronicle opened the paper to discover an anonymous piece entitled “Eclogue: Rusticus Gaudens: The Allotment System.” It presented a dialogue between two countrymen concerning the growing fashion for wealthy farmers to rent out strips of land to village labourers in compensation (though it does not say so) for having previously enclosed their smallholdings. John speaks:

Zoo you be in your groun’ then, I do zee

A-worken and a-zingen lik’ a bee.

How do it answer? What d’ye think about it?

D-ye think “tis better wi” it than without it?

A-reck’nen rent, an time, an’ zeed to stock it,

D’ye think that you be any thing in pocket?

He continues:

I wish the girt woones had a-got the greace

To let out land lik’ this in ouer pleace;

But I do fear there’ll never be nwone vor us,

An’ I can tell whatever we shall do:

We be a’most a-starven, an’ we’d goo

To ’merica, if we’d enough to car us.¹

(Jones 93–5)

What were readers to make of this? The writer evidently understood the concerns of the Dorset labouring class who in some cases were near to starvation. He (or she) had given them a voice. But the fact that the writer had employed verse was curious. That he was familiar with the lives of rural labourers was apparent, and yet he was clearly no ignorant working man, as was proved by his classical allusions. “Eclogue” suggested the poems of Virgil, and Rusticus Gaudens was Latin for “The Happy Countryman,” i.e. the man digging the allotment.

Few Chronicle readers would have been able to define what poetry was exactly, but they knew it when they saw it. They understood that it was undoubtedly a genteel phenomenon, in which the thoughts and emotions of the middle class were expressed in elevated language. Such preconceptions would have been formed by the paper’s regular “Poetry Corner,” featuring snippets from the likes of Mrs Hemans, Barry Cornwell, and even the seditious Lord Byron, now safely dead. If readers had ever heard the phrase “dialect poetry,” they would probably have considered it a contradiction in terms. If a passage of English had the characteristics of poetry it was not in dialect; if it were in dialect it was not poetry. In the linguistic spectrum, poetry was as far removed as possible from the language of dialect speakers. The terms were polar opposites.

This is not to say that later readers have been any clearer about the exact nature of poetry. A.E. Houseman declared that he could no more define it than a terrier could define a rat. Modern critics have tended to regard poetry as possessing certain complex linguistic characteristics. According to Winifred Nowottny, “The meaning and value in poems are the product of a whole array of elements in language” which interpenetrate each other (18), though it may be objected that this applies only to certain kinds of modern poetry.

What was clear to many Victorian readers, however, was that dialect was not a complex but a basic form of language, not far removed, it seemed to many, from the lowings and gruntings of the beasts in the fields. Cuddon defines dialect as: “A language or manner of speaking peculiar to an individual or class or region […] differing from the standard language of a country” (185). The standard form, on the other hand, according to Crystal, is “a variety of language which has acquired special prestige within a community” (1). By definition, therefore, dialect has an inferior social status. It is differentiated from the standard by possessing its own distinctive vocabulary, syntax, and accent.

Invaded and settled over the centuries by Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and Normans, England had unsurprisingly produced a wealth of local dialects, but these were not always regarded as inferior to a “standard.” Though Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400) had written in the East Midland vernacular, which helped to establish it as the standard language of Edward III’s court, evidence suggests that there were no derogatory notions attached to the use of the vernacular before Shakespeare’s time (Crystal 338). Regional dialects were even acceptable in high society. As Sir Thomas Malet observed, despite conversations “with the learnedest and politest persons, [Sir Walter Raleigh] spoke broad Devonshire to his dyeing day” (Crystal 338). And when James I of England (and VI of Scotland) first came down to London in 1603 with his Scots courtiers to ascend the throne, they spoke broad Scots. Throughout England, most people spoke in one dialect form or another and all were equally acceptable.

Slowly, however, as the century progressed, linguistic provincialisms began to come into ridicule or contempt, especially among Londoners. In plays and pamphlets, dialect speakers were variously represented as trouble-makers or ignorant buffoons (Crystal 338). The matter became especially noteworthy after the Act of Union of England and Scotland in 1707, with the arrival in London of many Scots legislators whose speech was often unintelligible to their fellow parliamentarians.

What was needed was a standard language that was comprehensible to everyone throughout the country, and fit for the purposes of legislation and scholarship. English needed to be “fixed” to establish a “correct” standard form which everybody could use. Accordingly, in 1755, Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary in an attempt to prescribe correct vocabulary and spelling. Meanwhile there arose a number of “orthoepists” such as Thomas Sheridan, who presumed to teach how words should be pronounced. A standard form of English was thus established, which became the accepted mode of communication among the upper classes, in the law, government, scholarship, and literature. Anyone who did not speak or write in this way was a subject for ridicule, as both comic and ignorant. Meanwhile, the vast mass of common people who continued to use their own dialect were cut out of literary consideration.

Chronicle readers, therefore, were initially perfectly safe in adopting a patronizing attitude to “Rusticus Gaudens.” And certainly, however acute its social observation and accuracy in recording the local vernacular, the piece has few aesthetic charms to recommend it. Yet, over the following years, as more dialect contributions to the Chronicle were printed, they began to elicit a certain grudging admiration. Some of those who had previously ridiculed them began to perceive that these poems exhibited a considerable degree of literary sophistication behind a veneer of simplicity:

False Friends-Like

When I wer still a bwoy, an’ mother’s pride,

A bigger bwoy spoke up to me so kind-like,

“If you do like, I’ll treat ye wi’ a ride

In thease wheel-barrow here.” Zoo I wer blind-like

To what he had a-worken in his mind-like,

An’ mounted vor a passenger inside;

An’ comen to a puddle, perty wide,

He tipp’d me in, a-grinnen back behind-like.

Zoo when a man do come to me so thick-like,

An’ sheake my hand, where woonce he pass’d me by,

An’ tell me he would do me this or that,

I can’t help thinken o’ the big bowy’s trick-like.

An’ then, vor all I can but wag my hat

An’ thank en, I do veel a little shy.

(Jones 329)

On the face of it, this too might have been dismissed as mere verse. It is undoubtedly “low” in that it is expressed in the language of the labourers in the fields and not the standard English of the professional middle classes. Moreover, its subject matter is a mere tale of a couple of little urchins fooling about with a wheelbarrow. Yet, on inspection, the poem begins to reveal a certain linguistic cunning. The repeated play upon the word “like” (which still features in the talk of many adolescents), though a faithful replication of the local dialect, somehow contrives both to mock itself and the speaker. It is a joke about a joke. Moreover, the earlier clunking couplets of the eclogues have here given way to a complex rhyme scheme with eight opening lines rhyming: ab, ab, ba, ab, and the latter six: bcd, bdc. Astonishingly, it is discovered to be Petrarchan sonnet. Moreover, its subject is not contemptible at all but explores one of the most profound of all human experiences, childhood’s first discovery of unkindness and betrayal.²

Eventually these contributions to the press were presented in book form and the identity of the poet (hitherto unknown, even to his family) was revealed. In 1844 appeared possibly the most original book of dialect poetry ever published in England: Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect by a Dorchester schoolmaster, William Barnes. It was followed in 1859 and 1861 by two more “collections” of his dialect poems.

Barnes was born the child of a humble “labourer in husbandry” in the Blackmore Vale, north Dorset in 1801. By prodigious efforts of self-education, he became a formidable linguistic scholar, able to read in the literatures of some 70 languages. He was uniquely qualified, therefore, to bring a considerable knowledge of versification to shape his native tongue. As for his motive in publishing these poems, though frequently reproached by friends for writing in dialect, he replied:

To write in what some may deem a fast-wearing speech form, may seem as idle as the writing of one’s name in the show of a spring day. I cannot help it. It is my mother tongue, and it is to my mind the only speech of the life that I draw.

(Barnes 1844, iii–iv)

Barnes’s temperament was essentially conservative, but his heart was always with the labouring people he had known in his childhood in the Blackmore Vale. His early dialogues concerned the great political issues affecting the rural economy in the early 19th century as seen from the labourer’s point of view, including the new poor laws, emigration, the enclosure of small farms, and the merits of allotments. His work, therefore, provides vivid insights into the social and linguistic history of English society that had remained unchanged since the days of Shakespeare, until the coming of the railways. But he did more. He became an artist. Hardy wrote that: “His ingenious internal rhymes, his subtle juxtaposition of kindred lippings and vowel sounds, show a fastidiousness in word-selection that is surprising in verse which professes to represent the habitual modes of language among the western peasantry” (Orel 80). A brief indication of this may be given by quoting his poem “The Stage Coach.” It begins:

Ah! When the wold vo’k went abroad

They thought it vast enough

If vow’r good ho’ses beat the road

Avore the coach’s ruf;

An’ there they zot

A-cwold or hot,

An’ roll’d along the groun’,

While the whip did smack

On the ho’ses’ back,

An the wheels went swiftly roun’, good so’s,

The wheels went swiftly roun’.³

(Jones 303–4)

Barnes was possibly the only dialect poet to combine his writing with plans for linguistic reform. He argued that the native Dorset tongue had its roots in the Anglo-Saxon of King Alfred’s Wessex, and as such was a “purer” and therefore a more truthful and immediate form of the language than standard English; that the language of farm workers was, therefore, preferable to the Latinized speech of professional people and therefore more sincere (Chedzoy 112–8). The “bonus” of this for poetry was that it was less “artificial,” less calculated than that couched in standard English. In an 1879 letter defending Barnes to his friend Robert Bridges, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:

[Dialect’s] lawful charm and use I take to be this, that it sort of guarantees the spontaneousness of the thought and puts you in the position to appraise its merits as coming from nature and not books and education. […] His poems I associate with […] the smell of oxeyes and apple lofts. [His poems are] straight from nature and quite fresh.

(Grigson 47–8)

Barnes has had many imitators such as Edward Slow from Wiltshire and Robert Young from Barnes’s own home town, Sturminster Newton. None, however, have approached his achievement as dialect poet. He has been described as “...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Rooting Dialects in Late 19th-Century Poetry
• PART II British Dialects in 20th- and 21st-Century Poetry
• PART III (Not so) New Dialects in Contemporary Poetry
• Index