'Ephemera' - A poem about Revd Sabine Baring-Gould

Ephemera

Did a moonless night frustrate your tread
Through puddle muck
In too-good shoes
To a porch where a ripening pheasant
Startled you full face
On its gibbet string?

Was your height stooped by a doorway
Whose draught frisked an oil lamp’s
Flame, sooting the whitewash?
Were scant victuals
(bread, dripping) hastily cleared
To instate you at a peat-stoked hearth?
Must you run an
Ink-stained finger
Around a cleric’s collar
To ease its prickling heat?

Was there a dwindling of breadcrumbs
From an old woman's apron
As she rose? Perchance you
Needlessly cleared your own throat
As hers prepared to sing?
Were cattle lowing in tethered stalls
Augmenting a lusty contralto
While your pen, at pace,
Spider-legged
An imprint of its lyric?

As a folk song’s climax lapsed to stillness
Did you hearken the voice of the Moor?
Hear snowflakes tap a windowpane
So slightly,
Like memory
Far remote
Near forgotten?

As you departed a Dartmoor longhouse
Into a first flush of snow
Did you remark how
The footprints that brought you here
Were already obscured?

AUTHOR NOTE

Eleanor Williamson is a member of Wycliffe Hall and wrote this poem for the centenary of Revd Sabine Baring-Gould's death. She says: "I became fascinated by SBG's quest to collect folk songs on brink of oblivion from oral tradition. My poem extends the theme of the ephemeral to the incidental details of the ordinary lives of which these songs were a part."

Revd Sabine Baring-Gould

Determined to preserve the traditional music of his region, Revd Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924) collected folk songs from the mouths of the people of Devon and Cornwall.

He published these as 'Songs of the West' and other collections. Also a prolific novelist, writer, folklorist, antiquarian, scholar, hymn writer and parish priest, he regarded his song collecting as his finest work.