Celebrate Barnes as well as Burns (From Dorset Echo)

Celebrate Barnes as well as Burns

10:29am Monday 6th February 2012 in Your letters

HILDA Swinney’s Island Eye last Tuesday contained a generous tribute from Dorset to the Scottish legend whose birthday each year is celebrated as ‘Burns Night’.

It is a pity it contained no reference to our own local great (and in many respects similar) poet, William Barnes, whose birthday anniversary is three days earlier.

Fortunately one of our national newspapers did on the same day contain a fine tribute under the heading ‘Barnes night anyone’? followed by the words, ‘as Scotland celebrates Rabbie Burns we should remember England’s own poet with a cause’.

Both were farmers’ sons, both were locally and largely self educated and both had large families, Barnes had seven children and Burns had eight – and both wrote in dialect.

There the similarity ends, for Burns was born in 1759 and died in 1796, aged 37, while Barnes was born in 1801 and died in 1886, aged 85. Burns was nationalistic but Barnes truly local and his interest was in his locality.

Burns is remembered worldwide. He may yet become the figurehead leading the Scots to the ‘independence’ many of them seem to want, while Barnes is mainly remembered (if at all) in his beloved Dorset.

It is possible though that he might become a national figure for, he was not just a poet as he also wrote much else, including one work which in our time of economic peril might well be of such relevance as to lead to a new understanding and a new attitude to the future.

What better time than now, when we in Dorset will be seeing so many worldwide visitors in the summer, for there to be a drive to see whether our man had the answers the world needs?

With the added ease of reference provided now by worldwide technology who knows what wonderful advances can be made?

I have no political motives nor any self interest either.

Roy Child Heron Close Preston