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

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Название Selected Poems of Bernard Barton, the 'Quaker Poet'
Автор произведения Christopher Stokes W.
Жанр Языкознание
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Издательство Языкознание
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isbn 9781785274428



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href="#ulink_8e76e255-51b9-5981-8688-fb31fde81e90">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

      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.

      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)