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F. W. Moorman >> Songs of the Ridings
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Songs of the Ridings
by F. W. Moorman
Contents:
Dedication
Preface
A Dalesman's Litany
Cambodunum
Telling the Bees
The Two Lamplighters
Our Beck
Lord George
Jenny Storm
The New Englishman
The Bells of Kirkby Overblow
The gardener and the Robin
Lile Doad
His last Sail
One Year Older
The Hungry Forties
The Flowers of Knaresborough Forest
The Miller by the Shore
The Bride's Homecoming
The Artist
Marra to Bonney
Mary Mecca
The Local Preacher
The Courting Gate
Fieldfares
A Song of the Yorkshire Dales
The Flower of Wensleydale
I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME TO THE YORKSHIRE MEMBERS OF THE WORKERS'
EDUCATIONAL ASSOCITION
Preface
About two years ago I published a collection of Yorkshire dialect poems,
chosen from many authors and extending over a period of two hundred and
fifty years(1). The volume was well received, and there are abundant
signs that the interest in dialect literature is steadily growing in all
parts of the county and beyond its borders. What is most encouraging is
to find that the book has found an entrance into the homes of Yorkshire
peasants and artisans where the works of our great national poets are
unknown. I now essay the more venturesome task of publishing dialect
verses of my own. Most of the poems contained in this little volume have
appeared, anonymously, in the Yorkshire press, and I have now decided to
reissue them in book form and with my name on the title-page.
A generation ago the minor poet was, in the eyes of most Englishmen, an
object of ridicule. Dickens and Thackeray had done their worst with him:
we knew him--or her--as Augustus Snodgrass or Blanche Amory--an amiable
fool or an unamiable minx. The twentieth century has already, in its
short course, done much to remove this prejudice, and the minor poet is no
longer expected to be apologetic; his circle of readers, though small, is
sympathetic, and the outside public is learning to tolerate him and to
recognise that it is as natural and wholesome for him to write and publish
his verses as it is for the minor painter to depict and exhibit in public
his interpretation of the beauty and power which he sees in human life and
in nature. All this is clear gain, and the time may not be far distant
when England will again become what it was in Elizabethan days--a nest of
singing birds, where the minor poets will be able to take their share in
the chorus of song, leaving the chief parts in the oratorio to the
Shakespeares and Spensers of tomorrow.
The twenty-five poems of which this volume consists are meant to serve a
double purpose. Most of them are character-sketches or dramatic studies,
and my wish is to bring before the notice of my readers the habits of mind
of certain Yorkshire men and women whose acquaintance I have made. For
ten years I have gone up hill and down dale in the three Ridings, intent
on the study of the sounds, words and idioms of the local folk-speech. At
first my object was purely philological, but soon I came to realise that
men and women were more interesting than words and phrases, and my
attention was attracted from dialect speech to dialect speakers. Among
Yorkshire farmers, farm labourers, fishermen, miners and mill workers I
discovered a vitality and an outlook upon life of which I, a bourgeois
professor, had no previous knowledge. Not, only had I never met such men
before, but I had not read about them in literature, or seen their
portraits painted on canvas. The wish to give a literary interpretation
of the world into which I had been privileged to enter grew every day more
insistent, and this volume is the fulfilment of that wish.
Of all forms of literature, whether in Verse or prose, the dramatic
monologue seemed to me the aptest for the exposition of character and
habits of mind. It is the creation--or recreation--of Robert Browning,
the most illuminating interpreter of the workings of the human mind that
England has produced since Shakespeare died. My first endeavour
was therefore
to watch
The Master work, and catch
Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play.
I have been, I fear, a clumsy botcher in applying the lessons that
Browning was able to teach, but the dramatic monologues of which this
volume is largely composed owe whatever art they may possess to his
example. My dramatic studies are drawn from life. For example, the local
preacher who expresses his views on the rival merits of Church and Chapel
is a Wharfedale acquaintance, and the farmer in 'Cambodunum' who declares
that "eddication's nowt but muckment" actually expressed this view to a
Chief Inspector of Schools, a member of the West Riding Education
Committee, and myself, when we visited him on his farm. I do not claim
that I have furnished literal transcripts of what I heard in my
conversations with my heroes and heroines, but my purpose throughout has
been to hold a mirror up to Nature, to give a faithful interpretation of
thought and character, and to show my readers some of the ply of mind and
habits of life that still prevail among Yorkshiremen whose individuality
has not been blunted by convention and who have the courage to express
their reasoned or instinctive views of life and society.
But the interpretation of the minds of Yorkshire peasants and artisans for
the benefit of the so-called general reader is only the secondary object
which I have in view. My primary appeal is not to those who have the full
chorus of English song, from Chaucer to Masefield, at their beck and call,
but to a still larger class of men and women who are not general readers
of literature at all, and for whom most English poetry is a closed book.
In my dialect wanderings through Yorkshire I discovered that while there
was a hunger for poetry in the hearts of the people, the great
masterpieces of our national song made little or no appeal to them. They
were bidden to a feast of rarest quality and profusion, but it consisted
of food that they could not assimilate. Spenser, Milton, Pope, Keats,
Tennyson, all spoke to them in a language which they could not understand,
and presented to them a world of thought and life in which they had no
inheritance. But the Yorkshire dialect verse which circulated through the
dales in chap-book or Christmas almanac was welcomed everywhere. Two
memories come before my mind as I write. One is that of a North Riding
farm labourer who knew by heart many of the dialect poems of the Eskdale
poet, John Castillo, and was in the habit of reciting them to himself as
he followed the plough. The other is that of a blind girl in a West
Riding village who had committed to memory scores of the poems of John
Hartley, and, gathering her neighbours round her kitchen fire of a winter
evening, regaled them with 'Bite Bigger', 'Nelly 'o Bob's' and other
verses of the Halifax poet. My object is to add something to this chorus
of local song. It was the aim of Addison in his 'Spectator' essays to
bring "philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to
dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffeehouses"; and, in
like manner, it should be the aim of the writer of dialect verse to bring
poetry out of the coteries of the people of leisure and to make it dwell
in artisans' tenements and in cottagers' kitchens. "Poetry," declared
Shelley, "is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest
and best minds," and it is time that the working men and women of England
were made partakers in this inheritance of wealth and joy.
It maybe argued that it should be the aim of our schools and universities
to educate the working classes to appreciate what is best in standard
English poetry. I do not deny that much maybe done in this way, but let
us not forget that something more will be needed than a course of
instruction in poetic diction and metrical rhythm. Our great poets depict
a world which is only to a very small extent that of the working man. It
is a world of courts and drawingrooms and General Headquarters, a world of
clubs and academies. The working man or woman finds a place in this
charmed world only if his occupation is that of a shepherd, and even then
he must be a shepherd of the Golden Age and answer to the name of
Corydon. Poets, we are solemnly assured by Pope, must not describe
shepherds as they really are, "but as they may be conceived to have been
when the best of men followed the employment of shepherd."
Class-consciousness--a word often on the lips of our democratic leaders
of today--has held far too much sway over the minds of poets from the
Elizabethan age onwards. Spenser writes his 'Faerie Queene' "to fashion a
gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline," and Milton's
audience, fit but few, is composed of scholars whose ears have been
attuned to the harmonies of epic verse from their first lisping of
Virgilian hexameters, or of latter-day Puritans, like John Bright, who
overhear in 'Paradise Lost' the echoes of a faith that once was stalwart.
But what, it may be asked, of Crabbe, and what of Wordsworth? The former
by his own confession, paints
the cot,
As truth will paint it and as bards will not;
but as we listen to his verse tales we can never forget that it is the
Rev. George Crabbe who is instructing us, or that his pedestal is the
topmost story of his three-decker pulpit at Aldborough. Wordsworth's
sympathy with the lives of the Cumberland peasantry is profound, and the
time is surely not distant when such a poem as 'Michael' will win a place
in the hearts of working men; but it is to be feared that in his own
generation "Mr Wudsworth" served rather--as a warning than an
encouragement to his peasant neighbours. "Many's the time," an old
Cumberland innkeeper told Canon Rawnsley, "I've seed him a-takin' his
family out in a string, and niver geein' the deariest bit of notice to
'em; standin' by hissel' an' stoppin' behind a-gapin', wi' his jaws
workin' the whoal time; but niver no crackin' wi' 'em, nor no pleasure in
'em--a desolate-minded man, ye kna... It was potry as did it."(2)
Our English non-dramatic poetry from the Renaissance onwards is second to
none in richness of thought and beauty of diction, but it lacks the
highest quality of all--universality of interest and appeal. Our poets
have turned a cold shoulder to the activities and aims of the working man,
and the working man has, in consequence, turned a cold shoulder to the
great English classic poets. The loss on either side has been great,
though it is only now beginning to be realised. "A literature which
leaves large areas of the national activity and aspiration unexpressed is
in danger of becoming narrow, esoteric, unhealthy. Areas of activity and
aspiration unlit by the cleansing sun of art, untended by the loving
consideration of the poet, will be dungeons for the national spirit,
mildewed cellars in which rats fight, misers hoard their gold, and Guy
Fawkes lays his train to blow the superstructure sky-high."(3)
There was a time when poetry meant much more to the working men of
England. In the later Middle Ages, above all in that fifteenth century
which literary historians are fond of describing as the darkest period in
English literature, the working man had won for himself what seemed a
secure place in poetry. Narrative, lyric and dramatic poetry had all
opened their portals to him, and made his life and aims their theme. Side
by side with the courtly verse romances, which were read in the bowers of
highborn ladies, were the terse and popular ballads, which were chanted by
minstrels, wandering from town to town and from village to village. Among
the heroes of these ballads we find that "wight yeoman," Robin Hood, who
wages war against mediaeval capitalism, as embodied in the persons of the
abbot-landholders, and against the class legislation of Norman game laws
which is enforced by the King's sheriff. The lyric poetry of the century
is not the courtly Troubadour song or the Petrarchian sonnet, but the
folk-song that sings from the heart to the heart of the beauty of Alysoun,
"seemliest of all things," or, in more convivial mood, accounts good ale
of more worth than a table set with many dishes:
Bring us in no capon's flesh, for that is often dear,
Nor bring us in no duck's flesh, for they slobber in the mere,
But bring us in good ale!
Bring us in good ale, and bring us in good ale;
For our blessed Lady sake bring us in good ale.
Most remarkable of all is the history of the drama in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. The drama was clerical and not popular in its
origin, and when, in course of time, it passed out of the hands of the
clergy it is natural to suppose that it would find a new home at the
King's court or the baron's castle. It did nothing of the kind. It
passed from the Church to the people, and it was the artisan craftsmen of
the English towns, organised in their trade-guilds, to whom we owe the
great cycles of our miracle plays. The authors of these plays were
restricted to Bible story for their themes, but the popular character of
their work is everywhere apparent in the manner in which the material is
handled and the characters conceived. The Noah of the Deluge plays is an
English master joiner with a shrewish wife, and three sons who are his
apprentices. When the divine command to build an ark comes to him, he
sets to work with an energy that drives away "the weariness of five
hundred winters" and, "ligging on his line," measures his planks,
"clenches them with noble new nails", and takes a craftsman's delight in
the finished work:
This work I warant both good and true.(4)
In like manner, the Shepherds of the Nativity plays are conceived and
fashioned by men who, fortunate in that they knew nothing of the
seductions of Arcadian pastoralism, have studied at first hand the habits
and thoughts of English fifteenth-century shepherds, and paint these to
the life.
Thus, at the close of the Middle Ages, narrative, lyric and dramatic
poetry seemed firmly established among the people. Not unmindful of
romance, it was grounded in realism and sought to interpret the life of
the peasant and the artisan of fifteenth-century England. The Renaissance
follows, and a profound change comes over poetry. The popular note grows
fainter and fainter, till at last it becomes inaudible. Poetry leaves the
farmyard and the craftsman's bench for the court. The folk-song,
fashioned in to a thing of wondrous beauty by the creator of Amiens, Feste
and Autolycus, is driven from the stage by Ben Jonson, and its place is
taken by a lyric of classic extraction. The popular drama, ennobled and
made shapely through contact with Latin drama, passes from the provincial
market-place to Bankside, and the rude mechanicals of the trade-guilds
yield place to the Lord Chamberlain's players. In the dramas of
Shakespeare the popular note is still audible, but only as an undertone,
furnishing comic relief to the romantic amours of courtly lovers or the
tragic fall of Princes; with Beaumont and Fletcher, and still more with
Dryden and the Restoration dramatists, the popular element in the drama
passes away, and the triumph of the court is complete. The Elizabethan
court could find no use for the popular ballad, but, like other forms of
literature, it was attracted from the country-side to the city. Forgetful
of the greenwood, it now battened on the garbage of Newgate, and 'Robin
Hood and Guy of Gisburn' yields place to 'The Wofull Lamentation
of William Purchas, who for murthering his Mother at Thaxted, was
executed at Chelmsford'.
We are justly proud of the Renaissance and of the glories of our
Elizabethan literature, but let us frankly own that in the annals of
poetry there was loss as well as gain. The gain was for the courtier and
the scholar, and for all those who, in the centuries that followed the
Renaissance, have been able, by means of education, to enter into the
courtier's and scholar's inheritance. The loss has been for the people.
The opposition between courtly taste and popular taste is hard to analyse,
but we have only to turn our eyes from England to Scotland, which lost its
royal court in 1603, in order to appreciate the reality of the
opposition. In Scotland the courtly poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries soon disappeared when James I exchanged Holyrood for Whitehall,
but popular poetry continued to live and grow. The folk-song gathered
power and sweetness all through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
till it culminated at last in the lyric of Burns. Popular drama, never
firmly rooted in Scotland, was stamped out by the Reformation, but the
popular ballad outlived the mediaeval minstrel, was kept alive in the
homes of Lowland farmers and shepherds, and called into being the great
ballad revival of the nineteenth century.
It is idle to speculate what would have been the progress of poetry in
England if the Renaissance had not come and the Elizabethan courtier had
not enriched himself at the expense of the people. What we have to bear
in mind is that all through the centuries that followed the Renaissance
the working men and women of England looked almost in vain to their poets
for a faithful interpretation of their life and aims. The wonder
is that the instinct for poetry did not perish in their hearts for
lack of sustenance.
There are at the present time clear signs of a revival of popular poetry
and popular drama. The verse tales of Masefield and Gibson, the lyrics of
Patrick MacGill, the peasant or artisan plays which have been produced at
the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, may well be
the beginning of a great democratic literary movement. Democracy, in its
striving after a richer and fuller life for the people of England, is at
last turning its attention to literature and art. It is slowly realising
two great truths. The first is that literature may be used as a mighty
weapon in the furtherance of political justice and social reform, and that
the pied pipers of folk-song have the power to rouse the nation and charm
the ears of even the Mother of Parliaments. The second is that the
working man needs something more to sustain him than bread and the
franchise and a fair day's wage for a fair day's work. Democracy, having
obtained for the working man a place in the government of the nation, is
now asserting his claim to a place in the temples of poetry. The
Arthurian knight, the Renaissance courtier, the scholar and the wit must
admit the twentieth-century artisan to their circle. Piers the ploughman
must once more become the hero of song, and Saul Kane, the poacher, must
find a place, alongside of Tiresias and Merlin, among the seers and
mystics. Let democracy look to William Morris, poet, artist and social
democrat, for inspiration and guidance, and take to heart the message of
prophecy which he has left us: "If art, which is now sick, is to live
and not die, it must in the future be of the people, for the people,
by the people."
In the creation of this poetry "of the people, by the people" dialect may
well be called upon to play a part. Dialect is of the people, though in a
varying degree in the different parts of the wide areas of the globe where
the English language is spoken; it possesses, moreover, qualities, and is
fraught with associations, which are of the utmost value to the poet and
to which the standard speech can lay no claim. It may be that for some of
the more elaborate kinds of poetry, such as the formal epic, dialect is
useless; let it be reserved, therefore, for those kinds which appeal most
directly to the hearts of the people. The poetry of the people includes
the ballad and the verse tale, lyric in all its forms, and some kinds of
satire; and for all these dialect is a fitting instrument. It possesses
in the highest degree directness of utterance and racy vigour. How much
of their force would the "Biglow Papers" of J. R. Lowell lose if they were
transcribed from the Yankee dialect into standard English!
But the highest quality of dialect speech, and that which renders it
pre-eminently fitted for poetic use, is its intimate association with all
that lies nearest to the heart of the working man. It is the language of
his hearth and home; many of the most cherished memories of his life are
bound up with it; it is for him the language of freedom, whereas standard
English is that of constraint. In other words, dialect is the working
man's poetic diction--a poetic diction as full of savour as that of the
eighteenth-century poets was flat and insipid.
It is sometimes said that the use of dialect makes the appeal of poetry
provincial instead of national or universal. This is only true when the
dialect poet is a pedant and obscures his meaning by fantastic spellings.
The Lowland Scots element in 'Auld Lang Syne' has not prevented it from
becoming the song of friendship of the Anglo-Saxon race all the world
over. Moreover, the provincial note in poetry or prose is far from being
a bad thing. In the 'Idylls' of Theocritus it gave new life to Greek
poetry in the third century before Christ, and it may render the same high
service to English poetry to-day or to-morow. The rise of Provincial
schools of literature, interpreting local life in local idiom, in all
parts of the British Isles and in the Britain beyond the seas, is a goal
worth striving for; such a literature, so far from impeding the progress
of the literature in the standard tongue, would serve only to enrich it in
spirit, substance and form.
1. 'Yorkshire Dialect Poems', 1673-1915 (Sedgwick and Jackson 1916)
2. 'Reminiscences'
3. J. Dover Wilson, Writing in the 'Athenaeum' under the pseudonym
"Muezzin," February, 1917. The quotation is from one of four articles,
entitled "Prospects in English Literature," to which the ideas set forth
in this Preface owe much.
4. "York Plays": The Building of the Ark.
A Dalesman's Litany
>From Hull, Halifax, and Hell, good Lord deliver us.
A Yorkshire Proverb.
It's hard when fowks can't finnd their wark
Wheer they've bin bred an' born;
When I were young I awlus thowt
I'd bide 'mong t' roots an' corn.
But I've bin forced to work i' towns,
So here's my litany:
Frae Hull, an' Halifax, an' Hell,
Gooid Lord, deliver me!
When I were courtin' Mary Ann,
T' owd squire, he says one day:
"I've got no bield(1) for wedded fowks;
Choose, wilt ta wed or stay?"
I couldn't gie up t' lass I loved,
To t' town we had to flee:
Frae Hull, an' Halifax, an' Hell,
Gooid Lord, deliver me!
I've wrowt i' Leeds an' Huthersfel',
An' addled(2) honest brass;
I' Bradforth, Keighley, Rotherham,
I've kept my barns an' lass.
I've travelled all three Ridin's round,
And once I went to sea:
Frae forges, mills, an' coalin' boats,
Gooid Lord, deliver me!
I've walked at neet through Sheffield loans,(3)
'T were same as bein' i' Hell:
Furnaces thrast out tongues o' fire,
An' roared like t' wind on t' fell.
I've sammed up coals i' Barnsley pits,
Wi' muck up to my knee:
Frae Sheffield, Barnsley, Rotherham,
Gooid Lord, deliver me!
I've seen grey fog creep ower Leeds Brig
As thick as bastile(4) soup;
I've lived wheer fowks were stowed away
Like rabbits in a coop.
I've watched snow float down Bradforth Beck
As black as ebiny:
Frae Hunslet, Holbeck, Wibsey Slack,
Gooid Lord, deliver me!
But now, when all wer childer's fligged,(5)
To t' coontry we've coom back.
There's fotty mile o' heathery moor
Twix' us an' t' coal-pit slack.
And when I sit ower t' fire at neet,
I laugh an' shout wi' glee:
Frae Bradforth, Leeds, an Huthersfel',
Frae Hull, an' Halifax, an' Hell,
T' gooid Lord's delivered me!
1. Shelter. 2. Earned,
3. Lanes 4. Workhouse 5. Fledged
Cambodunum
Cambodunum is the name of a Roman station, situated on a farm at Slack,
on the hills above Huddersfield.
Cambodunum, Cambodunum,
how I love the sound o' t' name!
Roman sowdiers belt a fort here,
gave th' owd place its lastin' fame.
We've bin lords o' Cambodunum
for well-nigh eight hunderd yeer;
Fowk say our fore-elders
bowt it of a Roman charioteer.
Ay, I know we're nobbut farmers,
mowin' gerse an' tentin' kye,
But we're proud of all we've stood for
i' yon ages that's gone by;
Proud of all the slacks we've drained,
an' proud of all the walls we've belt,
Proud to think we've bred our childer
on the ground wheer Romans dwelt.
"Niver pairt wi' Cambodunum,"
that's what father used to say;
"If thou does, thou'll coom to ruin,
beg thy breead thro' day to day."
I'll noan pairt wi' Cambodunum,
though its roof lets in the rains,
An' its walls wi' age are totterin';
Cambodunum's i' my veins.
Ivery stone about the buildin'
has bin dressed by Roman hands,
An' red blooid o' Roman sowdiers
has bin temmed(1) out on its lands.