Abstract
This chapter argues that the poems of William Barnes share interests with his sermons and that reading sermons and poems together, which has seldom been done before, enables a fuller understanding of Barnes’s poetic practice. Poems and sermons both offer a phenomenology of feelings, exploring turnings of emotion and their meaning for one’s position in the world and relation to others—including to God, who is represented in the sermons as a particularly mysterious other. In undertaking these explorations, both poems and sermons are animated by a pastoral consciousness that is characterized by a language of place and by investigation of how feelings link individuals into community. Attending to the double meaning of “pastoral”—as a noun for a poetic genre and as an adjective pertaining to spiritual guidance—illuminates how deeply interrelated were the two parts of Barnes’s dual vocation as pastor and poet.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Text from MS Book no. 7, p. 51, lines 9–10 in the William Barnes Archive, Dorset County Museum, Dorchester, where it is noted that the poem was published in a local journal, The Hawk, in 1864. A standard English version appears in Poems of Rural Life in Common English (London: Macmillan, 1868, 82).
- 2.
William Barnes, Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect, third collection (London: John Russell Smith, 1862), 124.
- 3.
- 4.
Chris Wrigley discusses how “Barnes’s craftmanship in poetry was intimately linked with his remarkable linguistic learning” (Wrigley 1984: 13). Stuart Gillespie gestures toward a conjunction between Barnes’s pastoral work, his translating, and his writing of poetry when he explores “metrical experimentation” in Barnes’s translations of the psalms (Gillespie 2008: 70), but the line of thought is not pursued.
- 5.
Barnes, Poems of Rural Life, 9, lines 29–30.
- 6.
Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22.2: 119.
- 7.
David Woodruff Smith, “Phenomenology,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed 10 January 2021, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/phenomenology/.
- 8.
William Barnes, William Barnes: The Dorset Poet, ed. Chris Wrigley (Stanbridge, Wimborne, Dorset: Dovecote, 1984), 214, lines 1–6. The autograph copy of “Clouds” is in MS Book 7 (poem four) of Barnes’s poems in his archive at the Dorchester County Museum.
- 9.
Ibid., lines 7–12.
- 10.
Ibid., lines 13–18.
- 11.
Here is reason to question Baxter’s view (1887: 244) that for “Clouds,” Barnes’s standard English translation is as good as the dialect version.
- 12.
Barnes, The Dorset Poet, 212, lines 1–8.
- 13.
Ibid., lines 9–16.
- 14.
Ibid., lines 17–24.
- 15.
Owen Schur, Victorian Pastoral (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), 7, 9–10, 7.
- 16.
Chris Wrigley, “Introduction,” in Barnes (1984), 3–4; and “Barnes, William,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 3, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1015–1018.
- 17.
There is not space here to consider his likely methods of delivery—how they compared with styles of sermonizing in his time; how they may have been shaped by his experiences as a churchgoer and his study at Cambridge, where delivery of sermons in Latin and English was important for his degree; how they were influenced by knowledge of his parishioners’ lives and interests; or how the liminal quality of the sermon as a written text for oral delivery that was to some extent formed in delivery may have related to a similarly liminal quality of dialect poetry. These would be good questions for investigation.
- 18.
Martin Dubois, “Sermon and Story in George MacDonald,” Victorian Literature and Culture 43: 578.
- 19.
From the William Barnes Archive, Dorset County Museum, Dorchester: Sermons Box 7, 1867–1870 B 473. I have retained the italics with which the King James translators mark their interpolations; to Barnes, a scriptural translator, they would have had meaning. Barnes’s sermons are handwritten and present challenges in transcription and interpretation. Where possible, my transcription preserves his choices in orthography, spacing, and indentation.
- 20.
Barnes’s handwriting is large, and it can be hard to determine where lines end through formal choice, as in verse, and where through the necessity of the margin, as in prose. Punctuation is sometimes irregular or hard to distinguish. Yet, sometimes, Barnes seems clearly to arrange lines through formal choice.
- 21.
“{Text}” is Barnes’s note; it is not clear to which text it refers. Below, the asterisk is Barnes’s.
- 22.
My text is from MS Book no. 7, p. 71, in the William Barnes Archive, Dorchester, lines 11–15.
- 23.
Alan Hertz, “The Hallowed Pleäces of William Barnes,” Victorian Poetry 23.2: 120.
- 24.
From the William Barnes Archive, Dorset County Museum, Dorchester: Sermons Box 7, 1867–1870 B 473; dated 19 April 1868.
- 25.
Barnes, The Dorset Poet, 168–69, lines 1–8.
- 26.
Ibid., 169, lines 9–16.
- 27.
Ibid., lines 25–32.
- 28.
Hertz, “Hallowed Pleäces,” 120, 121.
- 29.
From the William Barnes Archive, Dorset County Museum, Dorchester: Sermons Box 7, 1867–1870 B 473.
- 30.
W.J. Keith, “Thomas Hardy’s Edition of William Barnes,” Victorian Poetry 15.2: 126.
- 31.
Schur, Victorian Pastoral, 167.
References
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. Affective Economies. Social Text 22 (2): 117–139.
Barnes, William. 1862. Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect. 3rd Collection. London: John Russell Smith.
———. 1984a. William Barnes: The Dorset Poet. Ed. Chris Wrigley. Stanbridge, Wimborne, Dorset: Dovecote.
———. 1984b. The Church and Culture. In William Barnes: The Dorset Poet.
Baxter, Lucy. 1887. The Life of William Barnes, Poet and Philologist. London: Macmillan.
Chedzoy, Alan. 2010. The People’s Poet: William Barnes of Dorset. Stroud, Gloucestershire: History Press.
Drury, Annmarie. 2018. Aural Community and William Barnes as Earwitness. Victorian Poetry 56 (4): 433–453.
Dubois, Martin. 2015. Sermon and Story in George MacDonald. Victorian Literature and Culture 43: 577–587.
Gillespie, Stuart. 2008. William Barnes’s Rhythmical Versions of the Psalms. Translation and Literature 17 (1): 70–84.
Hertz, Alan. 1985. The Hallowed Pleäces of William Barnes. Victorian Poetry 23 (2): 109–124.
Keith, W.J. 1977. Thomas Hardy’s Edition of William Barnes. Victorian Poetry 15 (2): 121–131.
Schur, Owen. 1989. Victorian Pastoral. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Smith, David Woodruff. 2018. Phenomenology. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2018 ed. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/phenomenology/.
Waithe, Marcus. 2013. William Barnes: Views of Field Labour in Poems of Rural Life. In The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis, 460–474. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wrigley, Chris. 1984. Introduction. In William Barnes: The Dorset Poet, 1–19. Stanbridge, Wimborne, Dorset: Dovecote.
———. 2004. Barnes, William. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, vol. 3, 1015–1018. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the William Barnes Society and to the Dorset Museum, Dorchester, for granting me access to Barnes’s papers and permission to publish from them here. Research for this chapter was supported by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York. I dedicate this work to the memory of Marion Tait, who in her role as secretary to the William Barnes Society before her death in 2021 assisted and welcomed me with greatest generosity.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Drury, A. (2023). William Barnes’s Dual Vocation and the Management of Feeling. In: Behlman, L., Loksing Moy, O. (eds) Victorian Verse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-29695-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-29696-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)