Fossil Poetry by Jones Chris

Author:Jones, Chris [Jones, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780192557964
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2018-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

It is thought that, at an earlier stage of the evolution of the Germanic language family, the original meaning of the ge- prefix, surviving into Anglo-Saxon and still in contemporary German, was a perfective one, emphasizing the absolute completion of an action. It is not the same as the a-prefix, even though Barnes seems here to imply they were equivalent. At the very end of his life Barnes would still use the latter prefix as an example of the correspondence between Saxon and Dorsetshire, giving then a meaning for the prefix, and illustrating the Anglo-Saxon with West Country examples:

the ‘fore-wordling’ ‘A’ for the old Saxon an, meaning in or on, is put to verbs nouns, as

  “Daddy’s gone a-huntèn,” or

 He’s a-ploughèn, a-zowèn, a-reapèn, a-mowèn.84

In fact, while an could mean ‘on’ in Anglo-Saxon prepositionally, and was used in word composition with that sense, the true verbal augmentation that Barnes was presumably encountering in Anglo-Saxon was a-, which originally meant ‘forth’ or ‘away’, but was used to intensify the sense of the verbal root, and later came to indicate ‘on’ or ‘around’, or to give a sense of indefiniteness to participle forms. (As a sidenote, the Dorsetshire ‘-en’ form that Barnes is fond of replicating in his verbs, is much closer to the Anglo-Saxon participle form -end, as Barnes would have been well aware.) In Modern English, words in which this a- particle survives usually sound archaic (such as ‘abide’). Any meaning once inherent to the prefix is now invisible to most native speakers, but not to a Saxonist such as Barnes.

So in the poem ‘Woak Hill’, for instance, the frequent use of this ‘forewordling’ is used not only to satisfy the accentual-syllabic requirements for unstressed syllables in specific positions in the line (although it does fulfil that function), but it also sometimes qualifies the meaning of verbs that remain more vaguely intransitive in Standard English (Woak Hill’s sycamore leaves were not merely ‘spreading’, but ‘spreading about’ in hedges). More importantly the prefix introduces a note of indefiniteness to the time over which the poem’s verbal ideas were taking place, and therefore suggests a sense of timelessness, or out-of-time quality in which the poem’s action takes place, a quality very hard to replicate in Standard English: the sycamore leaves were in the process of ‘spreadèn’; the speaker’s goods were ‘sheenèn on’ while he was in the unfinished process of ‘leävèn’; his mind was continually ‘wandrèn’ on with sorrow. The difference is one of nuance rather than a change in meaning, but it is a nuance which cannot be emphasized so economically without the Anglo-Saxon particle vestigially preserved in Barnes’s Dorsetshire tongue.

While there is a happy concurrence between Saxon and Dorsetshire in the case of a-, Barnes sometimes pursues a similar tactic in his Standard English poems of making compounds from phrasal verbs by placing the particle before the main verb (as he advocated in his 1832 Gentleman’s Magazine article on the contemporary use of Saxonisms). In these instances it is not merely fortunate

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