Owlen (= 'roaming about at night')

A woman wanders through a wood, or a setting with the appearance of a wood, making odd gestures and talking about dead sheep and thrushes, and wearing a dress with an eyeball scrawled on it. Were we not aware that she is PJ Harvey and therefore an emissary of the powers beyond, we might simply assume that she was nuts. Our heroine was performing at the (slightly abortive) livestreamed Glastonbury Festival: not singing, but reading poetry, another couple of offerings from what we all still hope is the forthcoming collection ‘about a haunted sheep farm in Dorset’. But then it’s been forthcoming for four years now …

The poems were trailed as being ‘in Dorset dialect’. This is interesting, because Dorset dialect is not something anyone now uses, nor has used for a very long time. Remember I am a mere six weeks younger than Ms H, and, though I grew up in suburban Bournemouth rather than a village just northeast of Beaminster, my mother’s family in particular come from pretty close by there, in south Somerset, and they were all farm workers and the like: one of my mum’s cousins lives just round the corner from the Harvey quarrying business on Ham Hill. PJ’s accent, too, always strikes me as quite gentle (though she stresses it a bit in the Glastonbury performance), much more so than some of my relatives’. Nor is there even just one uniform Dorset accent: Polly clearly has the West Country rhotic ‘r’ in her speech – at least she often does – while I grew up without it, and it’s not that prevalent on the east side of the county anyway. In his 19^th-century Dorset dialect poetry, which she surely has in mind, William Barnes spells the name of the county Dosset, as though it has no ‘r’ sound at all; certainly not the ‘Darzet’ of general non-West Country imagination. You don’t hear that until you get to Cornwall.

I can’t remember anyone from my childhood using dialect words, either: rather, the older generations spoke what Barnes would have called ‘book-English’, just with an accent. The closest they came to it was my grandad’s insistence on referring to rats as ‘longtails’; but that smacks more of superstition than general usage, a bit like the reluctance of Portlanders to name the rabbits that undermine the quarries, instead describing them with any number of circumlocutory epithets. In early 1970s Corscombe, I suppose, some of the old farm workers may have used the dialect words they picked up from their grandparents, calling ewe-lambs chilvern or the meal in the middle of the day your nammet – ‘noon meat’; but by coincidence I’ve just read Thomas Hardy’s introduction to his Selected Poems of William Barnes, published in 1908, and even then he laments the demise of the old Dorset speech thanks to mobility and education, and the condescension of the well-to-do. I can’t imagine ‘Dorset Dialect’ was very prevalent even in the Blackmore Vale nearly fifty years ago.

William Barnes used dialect to emphasise the dignity of the Dorset people he worked with as schoolmaster and priest, the relevance of their outlook and experiences. Harvey isn’t doing that; nor does she seem to be using it to recall a culture the tail-end of which she may have brushed against in her childhood. Instead, the Anglo-Saxon straightforwardness of the old Dorset speech becomes an incantation, a means of piercing through normality into a heightened awareness of nature and a soul’s place in it: a way of meditating on identity and feeling, the opposite but equal of what Elisabeth Bletsoe does with her poetry of complexity and technical naming.

Goo on an' publish, Polly!