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Tokens
by William Barnes

English philologist, folklorist and poet. He is best known for his three series of Poems of Rural Life in the Dorsetshire Dialect (1844, 1847, 1862) which were translated into standard English in 1868. Among the best of these poems are The Wife A-lost and Linden Lea. His other work of note is Philological Grammar (1854). He was a considerable influence on Thomas Hardy, also from Dorset, who published a selection of his poetry in 1908.


Tokens
by William Barnes

Green mwold on zummer bars do show
That they've a-dripped in winter wet;
The hoof-worn ring o' groun' below
The tree do tell o' storms or het;
The trees in rank along a ledge
Do show where woonce did bloom a hedge;
An' where the vurrow-marks do stripe
The down the wheat woonce rustled ripe.
Each mark ov things a-gone vrom view -
To eyezight's woone, to soulzight two.

The grass agean the mwoldren door
'S a token sad o' vo'k a-gone,
An' where the house, bwoth wall an' vloor,
'S a-lost, the well mid linger on.
What tokens, then, could Meary gi'e
That she a-lived, an' lived vor me,
But things a-done vor thought an' view?
Good things that nwone agean can do,
An' every work her love ha' wrought,
To eyezight's woone, but two to thought.


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