William Barnes (1801–1886) wrote his finest poetry in the Dorset dialect — a rich, musical vernacular that he loved and studied as a philologist as much as a poet. His Poems of Rural Life celebrate the Dorset countryside, its farming communities, and the rhythms of village existence with a tenderness and precision that deeply influenced Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Barnes is one of the most distinctive voices in Victorian poetry, and one of the most unjustly overlooked. This free EPUB is cleanly formatted with the dialect spellings preserved exactly as Barnes intended.