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.
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