Musings
Before the falling summer sun
The boughs are shining all as gold,
And down below them waters run,
As there in former years they roll’d;
The poolside wall is glowing hot,
The pool is in a dazzling glare,
And makes it seem as, ah! ’tis not,
A summer when my life was fair.
The evening, gliding slowly by,
Seems one of those that long have fled;
The night comes on to star the sky
As then it darken’d round my head.
A girl is standing by yon door,
As one in happy times was there,
And this day seems, but is no more,
A day when all my life was fair.
We hear from yonder feast the hum
Of voices, as in summers past;
And hear the beatings of the drum
Again come throbbing on the blast.
There neighs a horse in yonder plot,
As once there neigh’d our petted mare,
And summer seems, but ah! is not
The summer when our life was fair.
Poem of the week visited the work of poet and philologist William Barnes some while ago, to enjoy one of his famous Dorset-dialect poems. These deserve the attention they’ve increasingly received, but it’s worth remembering that Barnes also wrote many poems in “national English”, and interesting to ask what their relationship might be in terms of diction and approach. In these poems, too, he sought a specifically English idiom. Do they “pale in comparison” with the vigorous, phonetically spelled dialect? I was struck recently, when reading a group of Barnes’s poems in one of the older Oxford anthologies, by the individuality and freshness of the non-dialect lyrics such as Musings.
The first stanza is particularly vivid. Soft alliterative effects complement the imagery of light and heat. The sun is “falling” – a plainer but more dramatic verb choice than “setting”. Autumn’s onset seems not far away but the sun’s power is still strident. The observation moves beyond the aestheticism of those boughs “shining all as gold” to the ordinary but striking description of a poolside wall as “glowing hot” and a pool that almost hurts the eyes in its “dazzling glare”.
The waters under the boughs “run / As there in former years they roll’d” and the contrast between “running” and “rolling” water hints at the running-on of time which has changed the speaker’s circumstances. The next stanza shifts to evening, an evening that evokes other long-lost evenings in its “gliding slowly by”. Then “the night comes on to star the sky” (a lovely and surprising use of “star” as a transitive verb). The different kinds of movement express the more drastic change for the speaker to a season “no longer fair”. The details of this negation are not imposed on the external scene: no pathetic fallacies are committed.
Night has arrived in the third stanza, and the sounds of what might be a harvest celebration intrude. There’s a significant change of personal pronoun, from “my life” in the first two stanzas to “our life” in the last. It may or may not relate to the “girl” remembered, in happier time, “standing by yon door”. That third stanza, perhaps the least cohesive of the three, is written entirely from the shared perspective.
The drumbeat carried on the “blast” may have military rather than harvest festival associations: even the horse, no longer “our petted mare”, might be about to be conscripted. Barnes, while a patriot, was no supporter of British colonial expansion. But these shadows of war might simply originate in the psychological state of the speaker, his sorrow souring the noise of others’ pleasure to aggravation and foreboding.
Overall, reticence seems an important quality in this poem – and perhaps it’s an imported one, too, related to the non-dialect idiom. It underpins the very title, Musings, which tells us so little. No Romantic claim of melancholy or desolation is declared, although the poem’s tone is almost elegiac. But those parenthetical exclamations of loss, “ah! ’tis not” and “ah! is not” break through the smooth surfaces. They belong to heightened but natural speech and show that emotional authenticity doesn’t depend on the use of all-out dialect.
There’s no clear instance of a too-literary diction draining this poem of life. But it’s worth sampling a full dialect poem in the context of Musings, and comparing effects. Tokens, which can be read here, is also a poem concerning loss, and here the imprints of the past on the present are observed in minute and wonderful detail. “Green mwold on zummer bars do show / That they’ve a-dripp’d in winter wet; / The hoof-worn ring o’ ground belo / The tree, do tell o’ storms, or het …”) That such detail can have earned its place in a lyric poem undoubtedly depends on the earthiness and precision of a rich dialect. But I’d still like to see Barnes valued more often for his achievement in both kinds of writing.
