Selected Poems of Bernard Barton, the 'Quaker Poet'. Christopher Stokes W.

⁷ Yet he is seen as sincere, lucid and tender. As critics understood it, his was the poetry of the affections rather than the passions, and he is marked as particularly successful in the pathetic and descriptive strains – indeed, we can detect a slight feminisation in his cultural reception. Above all, in an era which revalued simplicity – in peasant poets like John Clare and Suffolk-born Robert Bloomfield, and in Wordsworth’s aesthetic of common speech – his own simplicity found a ready resonance. Like William Cowper and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Barton’s diction and flow often veer towards the conversational, and his figuration is rarely excessive: things tend to bear straightforward allegorical morals while the verse’s texture is, with some interesting exceptions, not sensuous or visionary but delicate and reflective. Perhaps his favourite form is the nine-line Spenserian stanza, utilised in the Romantic period not so much for its past tendencies towards bejewelled richness, but for open and flexible simplicity.⁸

This unaffected aesthetic is one of the main ways in which readers began to negotiate the ‘phenomenon’ or paradox of a Quaker poet. The Society of Friends was known for several things in the period, ranging from their role in the abolition of slavery to a strong commercial reputation which would eventually underwrite well-known firms including Clarks, Cadbury and Barclays. However, the most conspicuous thing in everyday encounters would have been plain dress; this meant drab colours, simple and functional fabrics, no decorative embroidery or tailoring (e.g. frills, flounces, lace) and, famously, broad-brimmed hats for men and bonnets for the women. Nearly all of Barton’s initial reviews evoke the analogy of Quaker fashion, and, as the British Review commented in 1822, there is a sense that the quiet and reserved simplicity of his verse ‘is in some degree a new department, and it offers itself to the genius of this amiable Quaker as his own by right of occupancy and natural claim’.⁹ Other reviews talked about the Quaker muse or Quaker beauties. There is plenty of evidence that Barton himself also saw these affinities. For instance, in ‘The Quaker Poet, Verses on Seeing Myself So Designated’ (1821), he justifies Quaker poetry by arguing that quietly expressed feeling is more authentic than intense emotion superficially enfolded with ‘gayer robes’. In a characteristic analogy, the shaded stream is deeper and more beautiful than the sparkling brook open to the sunlight.

This latter comparison is also marked by Barton’s exemplary stylistic gesture, one which the reader will find articulated again and again: a version of litotes, understood in its classical sense of simplicity, understatement and strategic negation. Across his oeuvre, something lesser is privileged over something superficially more arresting, in the form that ‘X is not Y, but nevertheless…’ Thus, winter beauties can outmatch spring and summer, the Valley of Fern is more affecting than Romantic mountain scenery, Quaker bonnets delight over fashionable head-dresses, the modest ivy is chosen instead of spring-time birches, and the rustic pastoral of Crabbe and Bloomfield makes its own claim over classical traditions. Explicit or implicit litotes determines Barton almost completely as a Romantic-era nature poet. As E. V. Lucas argues, ‘Had [he] been painter instead of poet he would have given us landscapes in the style of Gainsborough.’¹⁰ His verse is shaped by the gentle topography of Suffolk, of its villages, fields, woodlands, meadows, heaths, winding rivers and North Sea beaches. This is not Snowdon or even the Lakes, but was never meant to be. Like Gainsborough’s early paintings of the same environs, Barton is heavily influenced by the notion of the picturesque: varied and irregular, often rustic, less perfect than beauty but less spectacular than the sublime. Such was a natural mode for him.

      The other analogy Lucas offers with the visual arts – not inappropriately, since Barton loved pictures – was the painter George Morland, famed for his warm scenes of rural life, influenced by Dutch and Flemish styles. This speaks to another unpretentious side of Barton’s poetic output: his tendency to the domestic, and a modest sentimentality which made him a natural fit for the popular periodicals and annuals. Occasionally, this is expressed in narrative verse or pastoral registers – for example ‘The Yellow-Hammer’, framed as a Suffolk villager’s song, or the Wordsworthian ‘A Grandsire’s Tale’ – but more commonly it appears drawn from life. In particular, both his extensive correspondence and the already cited local networks generated many informal poems of friendship and sociability. Like many Romantics, he repeatedly idealises children and childhood, and as touchstones of pure feeling they are frequent addressees and subjects. These gentle affections predominate almost entirely over stronger passions. When all these strands of humble sensibility are combined with moral and pious sentiments, as they generally are in Barton’s work, we can see yet another set of poetic decisions that contribute to an overall aesthetic of simplicity. As the aforementioned poem ‘The Quaker Poet’ reminds us in one of its central images, the nightingale is a songbird ‘of sober plume’ who sings, even while the peacock slumbers.

      ‘I must e’en be a Quaker still’: Barton and Religion

      If readers found it hard to disentangle Barton’s style from his Quakerism, there were also plenty of poems that took openly Quaker subjects and presented this world poetically to nineteenth-century audiences for arguably the first time. Poetic Vigils (1824) includes a triptych of memorials to Quaker martyrs, and the earlier ‘Verses, Supposed to be Written in a Burial-Ground Belonging to the Society of Friends’ is an explicitly Quaker re-writing of Gray’s famous ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’. There are also more indirect motifs. In particular, vocabularies of light and silence, although hardly absent from other Romantic-era writing, have evocative resonance in the Quaker context. The former implicates one of its most important doctrines, the ‘inward Light’, or the presence of God within the individual which enacts a potentially prophetic discerning of spiritual truths. The latter cannot help but evoke the values of a Quaker spirituality based on silence: without form or liturgy, Friends’ meetings would often pass with no speech whatsoever, as a practice of prayerful waiting. It is hence notable that light and silence are frequently deployed in moments of sacramental feeling or expression within Barton’s verse.

Such theologies of light and silence had their origins in the seventeenth century, and it is worth underlining that Barton’s Quakerism generally adhered to the denomination’s most traditional forms, as can be seen in his letters to Quaker correspondent Mary Sutton. This is important because the nineteenth century was a period of fundamental transformation for the Friends: Evangelical Christianity was vibrant and expansive, and quietistic Quaker orthodoxy was being displaced due to its influence (see the ‘Note on Quakerism’ for further detail). Barton, however, held fast to the faith in which he had been brought up, even though many around him were leaving the Society of Friends or adopting Evangelical practices. To Sutton, he averred that ‘a sprinkling, or water sprinkled, sacrament-taking Quaker is a sort of incongruous medley I can neither classify nor understand.’¹¹ However, his traditionalist positions were not held in hostility or with any desire to enter conflict with others. He disliked polemic, division and vain dispute, and his one solely religious volume of poetry, the important Devotional Verses (1826), shows how he could smoothly transcend potentially fraught issues. The place of scripture was an inner fault-line for the Society of Friends, and lay behind the most significant schism of nineteenth-century British Quakerism, the Beaconite Controversy of the 1830s. Yet Devotional Verses is almost entirely structured around Biblical verses: Barton simply saw no incompatibility worth contending over between scripture and the Light, either in Quaker tradition, or in his present moment.

      Devotional Verses also speaks to Barton’s wider religious reach. As the Athenaeum noted in an 1827 review of A Widow’s Tale, extracted in this volume, there was an irony in the fact that despite coming from a small and distinctive sect Barton was one of the leading religious poets of the day. Although Barton’s Quakerism is orthodox (in both loose and technical senses of the word), his religious sensibility was broad, sensitive and Biblically literate. At a time when the amorality and infidelity of literature (most obviously in the pervasive shadow cast by Byronism)