UNEDUCATED POETS

Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets. By Robert Southey. (Milford. 3s. 6d.) LIOUTHEY, like everyone else, felt that there were certain things he had a right to expect from the uneducated poet.

He was too kind-hearted to say so, however, and when Mr. John Jones, a faithful family butler, sent him a sheaf of verses with a very suitable letter, he only remarked gently, " I wished they had been either better or worse." For Mr. Jones had followed the best models of the time. For the Robin, he wrote .-

" The gleanings of the sumptuous board Conveyed by some indulgent fair, Are in a nook of safety stored And not dispensed till thou art there."

Southey was not quite sure what he had expected ; but it Was not this. Obviously the man was misled. He set to work to find some other poets in low life " who knew better how to express pain and wonder with the careless and zestful language proper to people of their station.

Stephen Duck was a thresher of Wiltshire. He had practi- cally no schooling, but he longed after knowledge. He worked doubly hard so that he could put aside an hour to study Milton, or Seneca or the Spectator. The last he thought was a particular help to him, and he would write poems modelled on those in the paper for his own amusement. After writing them he would throw them away. He was, however, discovered and invited to write poems on appointed subjects. He wrote them with perfect good nature, though a little doubtfully. At least he satisfied his patrons. The Queen made him keeper of her library at Richmond, and he studied for the Church. He ended as a very excellent parish priest in Byfleet, but in 1756 he suddenly went insane and drowned himself. His anxiety had always been to succeed ' as to . . . the poetry he should be employed in . . . from a principle of gratitude . . . to please those friends that had been so generous to him." His most important poem was " The Thresher's Labour," a long and careful description of the life he knew so well, set down in the measured language he had studied so eagerly in the Spectator :— " Divested of our cloaths with flail in hand, At proper distance, front to front we stand. And first the threshal's gently swung to prove Whether with just exactness it will move : That once secure, we swiftly whirl them round, From the strong planks our crab-tree staves rebound, And echoing barns return the rattling sound."

" A process is observable both in the verses of Woodhouse and Duck," says Southey . . . " They began by expressing their own thought and feelings in their own language ; all which, owing to their stations in life, had a certain charm of freshness:; but that attraction passes away when they begin to form their style upon some approved model."

The best the editor could find in Woodhouse was :— " For oft she sighs and oft she weeps, And hangs her pensive head,

While blood her furrowed finger steeps, And stains the passing thread."

Ann Yearsley was a milkwoman who read Paradise Lost, Shakespeare, and a translation of the Georgics. She interested Miss Hannah More who saw that her verses were published, at the same time writing :- " I hope she is convinced that the making of verses is not the great business of human life and that as a wife and mother she has duties to fill, the smallest of which is of more value than the forest verses she can write. But as it has pleased God to give her these talents, may they not be made as instruments to mend her situation Y " Unfortunately, when the profits came in, Mrs. Yearsley was not content to leave them entirely in the hands of her patroness.

She demanded to be made a trustee, too, on the ground that she knew best how the money should be spent on her children.

So Miss More abandoned her protegee in disgust. The milk- woman continued to publish verse until she died insane.

She was certainly more vigorous than the men :— " Cruel the hand

Which tears the veil of time from black dishonour Or, with the iron pen of justice cuts

Her cypher on the scars of early shame."

Southey had been cheated, just as everyone is cheated, by the uneducated poet. To say that the poets wrote passages " which would have done no discredit to more celebrated names " was simply to confuse the issue. If these people would not write like uneducated poets there did not seem to be any reason for the bringing of their poems to light. But Southey was too kind-hearted for that :- " If the talents which they (the patrons) brought into notice were not of a kind to produce extraordinary fruits, a deserving man was raised from poverty, and placed in circumstances favour- able to his moral and intellectual nature."

But there was one man who did give Southey satisfaction. That was John Taylor, the water-poet of the sixteenth century. He had the same schooling as the others but he rowed Londoners across the Thames and talked to everyone he could get hold of. Also he had been to sea, to Spain and the Azores with Essex. He was always out for new experiences, for contacts with different minds, and he would never stay quiet. He loved eating and drinking and moving about. He walked from London to Edinburgh without any money, made a special journey to Prague for a bet, rowed from London to Queensborough in a paper boat with two stock fish tied to canes for oars. Wherever he went men ran after him and clutched him by the sleeve and asked for news, just to hear him talk. He wrote because he wanted to and he did not take his writings very seriously ic This book was written (not that here I boast), Put hours together, in three days at most, And give me but my breakfast, I'll maintain To write another ere I eat again."

He also wrote because that was the easiest way for him to -tell people what had happened :- " We had at one time set upon the table

Good ale of Hyssop ('twas no Esop fable) Then we had ale of Sage and ale of Malt ; And ale of Wormwood that could make one halt ; Thus all these men at their own charge and cost Did strive whose love should be expressed most ; And farther to declare their boundless loves, They saw I wanted, and they gave me, gloves.

4

My bed was curtained with good wholesome airs And being weary I went up no stairs -

The sky my canopy ; bright Phoebe ; Sweet bawling Zephyrus breath'd gentle wind ; In heaven's star chamber I did lodge that night, Ten thousand stars me to my bed did light.

Here was the only poet that could be said to have written the sort of thing that an uneducated poet should write. Yet how could a real uneducated poet write deliberate nonsense rhymes like " Give me a medlar in a field of blue Wrapt up stigmatically in a dream" ?

But on the whole this boisterous, sophisticated man with -Ids. mind full of -the world's business was expressing himself just as Duck should have done, who walked humbly and between whose ekes and the sunset there was no veil of know- ledge and distraction. Apparently, uneducated poets did not write the kind of poetry that was to be expected of them. Their uneducatedness did not leave them freer to see Nature ; it only left them drowsy. They were aware of their sunsets but they had not been sharpened to self-consciousness by experience, they could not compare sensations. They read the Spectator and saw the sunset. Southey thought that if they had not read the Spectator they would have seen the sunset more clearly. But that is proved untrue more than once here. If they had not read the . Spectator they would not have written about the sunset, but they would have seen it neither more nor less distinctly.