Songs of the Ridings

erblow
The gardener and the Robin
Lile Doad
His last Sail
One Year Older
The Hungry Forties
The Flowers of Knaresborough Forest
The Miller by the Shore
The Bride's Homecoming
The Artist
Marra to Bonney 
Mary Mecca
The Local Preacher
The Courting Gate
Fieldfares
A Song of the Yorkshire Dales
The Flower of Wensleydale

I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME TO THE YORKSHIRE MEMBERS OF THE WORKERS' EDUCATIONAL ASSOCITION

Preface

About two years ago I published a collection of Yorkshire dialect poems, chosen from many authors and extending over a period of two hundred and fifty years(1). The volume was well received, and there are abundant signs that the interest in dialect literature is steadily growing in all parts of the county and beyond its borders. What is most encouraging is to find that the book has found an entrance into the homes of Yorkshire peasants and artisans where the works of our great national poets are unknown. I now essay the more venturesome task of publishing dialect verses of my own. Most of the poems contained in this little volume have appeared, anonymously, in the Yorkshire press, and I have now decided to reissue them in book form and with my name on the title-page.

A generation ago the minor poet was, in the eyes of most Englishmen, an object of ridicule. Dickens and Thackeray had done their worst with him: we knew him--or her--as Augustus Snodgrass or Blanche Amory--an amiable fool or an unamiable minx. The twentieth century has already, in its short course, done much to remove this prejudice, and the minor poet is no longer expected to be apologetic; his circle of readers, though small, is sympathetic, and the outside public is learning to tolerate him and to recognise that it is as natural and wholesome for him to write and publish his verses as it is for the minor painter to depict and exhibit in public his interpretation of the beauty and power which he sees in human life and