James Whitcomb Riley

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Dialect in the Verse of ‘The Hoosier Poet.’

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SOURCE: Randall, Dale B. J. “Dialect in the Verse of ‘The Hoosier Poet.’” American Speech 35 (1960): 36-50.

[In the following essay, Randall provides a linguistic analysis of dialect in five poems by Riley, noting a controversy around whether Riley invented or faithfully reproduced his particular Hoosier dialect.]

An admirer of James Whitcomb Riley has claimed that ‘for his dialect poetry he kept notebooks as accurate as a scientist's. … The philologist of the future, studying Middle-Western colloquialisms of the late-nineteenth century, may depend on Riley's transcription of them as the most exact ever made.’1 Yet another reader maintains that Riley's dialect verse depicts ersatz Hoosiers who speak ‘a dubious dialect as yet unidentified by any philologist.’2 As such comments suggest, no very diligent search is necessary to find Riley criticisms ranging over the entire spectrum of opinion and prejudice. Since no study of the poet's dialect, so far as I know, has ever been undertaken, and since a sound evaluation of his work must involve a knowledge of his language, I offer here a brief analysis of his dialect usage. Let us consider the following kinds of evidence: opinions concerning Riley's dialect; his modus operandi; his own comments and poems; and the nature of Hoosier speech.

Perhaps early criticisms of Riley are best approached with the recollection that Americans at the close of the last century had not only what seemed an innate enthusiasm for American writing, but also the remnants of a feeling that dialect in literature was not wholly respectable. The Brahminical smile of H. W. Boynton, who refers to Riley's ‘momentary lapses into English,’3 is merely one expression of the idea that ‘the men and women who speak dialect are not worth portraying in literature.’4

Riley felt called on to attack the idea. Even Chaucer, he wrote in an article for the Forum, ‘when his song was at best pitch,’ was writing dialect.5 In fact, it is always a good writer's duty to permit ‘his rustic characters to think, talk, act and live, just as nature designed them.’6 Hence, ‘the real master must not only know each varying light and shade of dialect expression, but he must as minutely know the inner character of the people whose native tongue it is, else his product is simply a pretence—a wilful forgery, a rank abomination.’ At its best, well-written dialect will ‘convey to us a positive force of soul, truth, dignity, beauty, grace, purity, and sweetness, that may even touch us to the tenderness of tears.’7

For some readers, of course, this sort of rationalization was unnecessary. To William Dean Howells, among others, Riley seemed worthy of favorable comparison with Burns and Wordsworth. ‘The Hoosier parlance which he has subdued to rhyme,’ wrote Howells, ‘has not the consecration which time has given the Scottish dialect in Ramsay and Burns, but it says things as tenderly and as intimately, and on the lips of this master it is music.’8 On the whole, in fact, Middle Westerners contemporary with Riley tended to regard his Hoosier very favorably. Edward Eggleston, himself a student of earlier Indiana speech, observed in a letter to Brander Matthews that Riley's Hoosier was ‘a little thin,’ but he also said that ‘there is not a false note in it. … As dialect it is perfectly sound Hoosier …’ Eggleston reasoned that Riley learned it ‘more among villagers than among rustics,’ and that by the time he came along ‘the tremendous … vigor of the public school system in Indiana must have washed the color out of the dialect a good deal.’ Moreover, unlike Lowell, who uses dialect ‘with a full appreciation of its linguistic and philosophical relations,’ Riley, according to Eggleston, uses it

only so far as it contributes to his effect of pathos or humor. Of its nicer shades, its half-tints he is as yet unconscious. This is inevitable in a man of his age and in one who has continued to live where he cannot know any other rustic speech for comparison.9

In more recent years, literary historians have tended either to ignore Riley or to dismiss him with a patronizing remark or two. In 1938, for instance, Richard A. Cordell wrote that the poet ‘reports the uneducated Hoosier's bad grammar rather than his dialect.’10 Far more persuasive are the words of Horace Gregory, who in 1951 expressed the opinion that Riley wrote

a language that has all the marks of literary and not literally spoken invention; in it we hear echoes of a speech that has its origin in The Biglow Papers … in the Far Western gold rush stories of Bret Harte, and in the dialect verses of John Hay. The Hoosier dialect as Riley wrote it was a variation of all these, a skillful combination. … [It is an] unliteral dialect that has behind it a span of literary precedent, and as Riley wrote it, it extended the span of a nineteenth century convention.11

On the other hand, one also finds modern writers who continue to champion Riley. R. E. Banta, for example, did not hesitate to claim in 1949 that in Riley's ‘great talent for the accurate hearing and the true recording of dialect he was unsurpassed in his time. His Hoosier was perfection itself …’12

It seems clear that there is no such thing as a general opinion on Riley's dialect. Significantly, however, the poet was nearly universally praised for his accuracy by Middle Westerners of his own day who had had a chance to hear the language he tried to record. Although such spokesmen were surely swayed to some degree by pride of location, the sheer volume of their voices drowns out such mild complaints as Eggleston's.

In attempting an estimate of our own, we shall be aided by a knowledge of how Riley worked. William Lyon Phelps, a personal friend of Riley, echoes such writers as Banta, Carman, Tevis, and the Russos by saying that the poet ‘always took infinite pains with his verse, considered carefully its technique and the weight of every word.’13 Another source on the subject is George Hitt, who not only knew Riley for many years, but shared an office with him when they both worked on the Indianapolis Journal. Hitt writes:

As we were both Hoosiers, born and bred, and had heard the same kinds of dialect, we drifted into the habit of using it with each other without thought or comment. Wherever we were, whether traveling, or in our office, or at my home, Riley, assuming the old farmer, or some other character, with me for a mere foil, would keep up long conversations, trying out new phrases and terms of speech, which afterwards would appear in his verse or prose. He was constantly studying and determining the values of the common-talk that we heard on trains or in towns or out in the open country; hence, there is nothing artificial in his dialect—he knew it at first hand.14

Nor was Riley's interest in dialect a late development. Another friend, Minnie Mitchell, reports that even as a child the poet took careful note of the dialect of rustic clients who came in to see his father, a lawyer.15 In other words, Riley did not stumble over fame while strolling through the ‘medder’ one day. No matter what one decides about the accuracy of his dialect or the value of his verse, there are numerous witnesses to testify that he was a painstaking craftsman both in the gathering and the use of his materials.

Further evidence concerning language is available from Riley himself. In a letter dated August 4, 1880, we find him taking a stand on the question of socalled ‘poetic diction.’ To a would-be writer, Mrs. R. E. Jones, he reveals that:

It has been, and is, my effort to avoid all phrases, words or reference to the old-time order of literature; and to avoid, too, the very acquaintance of it—because we are apt to absorb more or less of the peculiar ideas, methods, etc., of those authors we read; and as everything is right in its place—so the old authors are right in the past—while new ones must be here in the present—see?16

He even abrogates the syntax of the old school. In a letter to Madison Cawein on September 19, 1891, he says:

Don't—don't—Don't ever becloud your beautiful ideas by too intricate—too long, or too involved sentences. … And don't—don't—Don't invert! No matter though every classic master whose winy verse you ever jabbed your beak in has inverted, don't you do it. You improve on them by getting there directly …17

Of course, not all of Riley's edicts are negative. To Lucy Furman in February, 1893, he writes as follows:

In dialect be as conscientious as in your purest English—seeing to it always, with most vigilant minuteness, that your unlettered characters are themselves in thought, word and deed. … If anything be not plausible as Nature, reject it—scratch it out.18

Perhaps the most telling of the passages in his correspondence appears in a letter to Benjamin Parker (August 29, 1897).19 Here he reveals his attitude toward dialect, his chief goal, and a nicety of insight which might surprise his detractors. Riley writes, ‘I most conscientiously believe … there is a legitimate use for it [dialect], and as honorable a place for it as for the English, pure and unadulterated. The only trouble seems to be its misuse …’ Later he observes that ‘once in a while … some finished critic discriminates and estimates the dialectic purpose exactly.’ He cites as an example a critic of his ‘Nothin' to Say’ who has written that the poem ‘is an illustration of the only possible excuse for this sort of work,’ namely, that ‘the tender and touching little poem does not depend on the dialect,’ but that ‘the feeling, the homely pathos of the verse makes it of value, and the dialect is simply its strongest and most fitting expression.’ Riley adds: ‘That is the highest praise I seek or my ambition desires …’

Hamlin Garland is also helpful in rounding out the evidence concerning Riley's views on language. He quotes the poet as saying that he has written dialect in two ways:

One, as the modern man, bringing all the art he can to represent the way some other fellow thinks and speaks; but the ‘Johnson’ poems [Riley used this pseudonym for such verses as ‘When the Frost Is on the Punkin’] are intended to be like the old man's written poems, because he is supposed to have sent them in to the paper himself. … But, in either case, it's the other fellow doin' it. I don't try to treat of people as they ought to think and speak, but as they do think and speak. In other words, I do not undertake to edit nature, either physical or human.20

And, as a matter of fact, we learn elsewhere that the famous refrain of ‘When the Frost Is on the Punkin’ was taken verbatim from an old-timer who lived near Greenfield.21

Although Riley's long-held aims incline one to believe in the accuracy of his dialect, a man's reach may exceed his grasp. Because Riley's poems themselves must be examined before a judgment can be made, I have gone to the collection known as Riley Farm-Rhymes,22 an obvious choice for our present purpose, since we may well ignore such trembly pieces as ‘Dream’ or any of Riley's other kinds of verse. Of the twenty-seven selections contained in this volume about 70 percent are in Riley's Hoosier dialect, about 22 percent in a fairly simple, straightforward language that we might call General American or Refined General American (using ‘Refined’ to indicate the scarcity of colloquialisms), and 4 percent (one poem) in a sort of hybrid language, part General and part ‘Poetic.’ It may come as a bit of a shock that the book also contains a poem in what surely may be called ‘Poetic English.’ A verse entitled ‘June’ opens thus:

O queenly month of indolent repose!
I drink thy breath in sips of rare perfume,
As in thy downy lap of clover-bloom
I nestle like a drowsy child and doze …(23)

In succeeding lines we come across ‘zephyr,’ ‘damask-work,’ ‘e'er,’ and ‘glade,’ and in the concluding line we even find so heinous a remnant of the past as ‘All hail the Peerless Goddess of the Year!’

In order to understand the nature of the Hoosier poet's more famous language I have chosen five poems from Farm-Rhymes: ‘When the Frost Is on the Punkin’; ‘Mylo Jones's Wife’; ‘Griggsby's Station’; ‘Old-fashioned Roses’; and ‘A Tale of the Airly Days.’24 The following lists, drawn from these poems, represent an attempt to analyze Riley's dialectal variations under the headings of pronunciation, morphology and syntax, vocabulary, and eye dialect. Of course, different students would produce different listings. Since Riley did not write phonetically, for example, it is sometimes difficult to tell what sounds he intended to convey (witness the first vowel sound in ‘hosses’). Furthermore, although I have recorded both variant forms and the number of times each expression is used (once, unless a number appears after the entry), I have done so with the realization that Riley's use of refrains distorts the picture somewhat, and that a larger sampling would indicate different emphases. In any event, here is the evidence as I see it:

Pronunciation
1. Unstressed [-n] for [e]
a-bloomin' boardin' hitchin' sleepin'
a-clickin' butchern hummin'-bird (2) somepin'
a-drivin' buzzin' kit-and-bilin' struttin'
a-feelin' chinkin' livin' thinkin'
aggervatin' cider-makin' lovin' (adv.) tickin'
a-hangin' clackin' makin' trackin'
a-livin' cluckin' mournin' visitun
a-marchin' coaxin' nothin' (3) wantin'
appetizin' colorin' picklin' whole-indurin'
a-preachin' cookin' pilin' whoopin'
a-rendern coolin' raspin' workin' men
a-sayin' displayin' risin'
a-takin' feelins rulin'
a-visitin' growin' sewin'
2. Aphetic Forms
'bide 'commodate 'lowed 'round (5)
'bout (2) 'crost 'lows (2) 'way
3. [[UNK]]
a) From -ow words
feller (e) shadders
medder Shallor Ford
shadder yeller
b) From other words
hallylooyer wimmern-folks (2)
womern
4. [ε]
ef (2) gethers jest (just) (7) tel (till) (7)
getherd Jedgmunt Day shet tetch
5. [i]
chist (chest) kin (can) wimmern- wizzen (weasand)
gits sich (4) folks (2) yit (4)
6. [i]
furries (furrows) Laury Marindy
hallylooyer 'Lizy nary (ne'er a)
7. Miscellaneous Sounds Dropped25
[i] ever' ever'wheres purt'
[s] 'leven 's (unstressed is)
's (unstressed as) s'pose
butchern
[n] 'less tel (till) (7)
[b] 'afore 'cause (2) 'fore
[t] le's (4)
[d] blame old-fashion' thousan' wizzen
[g] od-rot
[v] kindo' (3) o' (3) sorto' (2)
[ð] 'at (2) 'em (16)
[l] a'most he'p (3) he'pmeet
[w] allus (3)
[r] hosses hoss-flies
8. Miscellaneous Sounds Added26
[s] ellum
[b] fambily
[t] 'crost onc't (2)
[z] ever'wheres
[h] hain't
[n] hern
[j] fi-er fi-er-place
[r] ort (ought) wimmern-folks womern
9. Miscellaneous Sound Changes
[e] airly
[æ] ca'm ga'nts (deprives of food) Shakspeare's27
draps
[α] tossels
[s] hollyhawks (perhaps eye dialect)
[o] pore (poor) (7) ort (ought)
[[UNK]] burried purt' whur
[[UNK]] aggervatin' children (2)
[s] allus (3)
[L] putt (2) ruther (3) tuk
[ai] kit-and-bilin'
[jα] cyarpets
[t] asts helt
[p] somepin'
[kt] pictur'
[ek] punkin (5)
Morphology and Syntax
1. Verbals with Prefixed -a
a-bloomin' a-clickin' a-drivin' a-feelin'
a-hangin' a-marchin' a-rendern a-takin'
a-livin' a-preachin' a-sayin' a-visitin'
2. Verb Forms
ain't (2) ga'nts hain't run (pret.)
'd ort to have (had ought to have) gethers have saw was tuk
growed heerd writ
draps
3. Subject-Verb Disagreement
does is (5) makes was
gethers is makin' tells (2) wuzn't
4. Double Negative
ain't no (2) don't never ner no not to … ner …
don't chuse none don't see no … ner no nothin' ner
don't need no ner no … ner never … nor
5. Substantive
a) Pleonastic Substantive
John … he wife she says workin' men … they
wife she does wife she sews
b) there › they
they ain't (2) they's (2) they wuzn't
6. Miscellaneous
a) hern (gen.)
b) ever'wheres (adv.)
7. Idioms and Phrases
call around likes of us stay the Sunday through
clean above like some folks won't
cut loose mercy knows! tell it (tell about it)
dead and gone mighty near take and turn in and …
don't you know (not interrog.) mortal pity things seem some
pilin' out (of a buggy) whare's the livin' use?
down t'other side whole kit-and-bilin'
great big purt' nigh
I gum! raise (mule colt) … by hand
it's then's (it is then is …)
rich as all creation
Vocabulary
back-log's like (as) (4) relation (relative) (4)
blame (adj.) lonesome-like souse
carpet-rags lower eighty (A.) trundle-beds
caseknife man (husband) uses (v.i., to keep company)
chinkin' men-folks War, The
chuse (want) mournin' (clothes) whole-indurin'
dad-burn nary wimmern-folks
displayin' (showy) neighbors (v.i.) wizzen
flock (many) od-rot
fool (adj.) pack (of men)
ga'nts Pap (2)
harty-like pap's
joke (v.t.) pattent-right
kyouck (onomatopoeia) piece-quilts
posies
puncheon
Eye Dialect
atmusfere hart thare
blossums harty-like theyr (3)
branes hollyhawks (perhaps [α] › [s]) thro'
celler-floor (cf. flore) thrugh
chuse ner (unaccented nor) (6) ust to (8)
er (unaccented or) whare
ev'ry Piller (of Fi-er) whare's
fer (unaccented for) (6) plane (plain) whipperwill
russel wuz
flore saussage wuzn't
good 'eal sermuns
guineys sware

A number of facts emerge from this analysis. With regard to pronunciation, the single most characteristic feature of Riley's dialect is his amputation of the terminal g. This comes as no surprise. As Virginia McDavid reports in her study ‘Verb Forms of the North-Central States and Upper Midwest,’ about two thirds of her informants use the -in ending in present participles; ‘only in the cultured group is it not a majority form.’28 Most often Riley suggests the sound with an apostrophe (sleepin'), but occasionally he offers such variations as butchern, feelins, and visitun. Attracted by this device, a Riley enthusiast once avowed that ‘music enters at the spaces left by all those hard g's and guttural word-endings he cuts out so gracefully.’29 But Riley was no automatic g-chopper. In May, 1893, he complained to William Carey:

I can never get … ‘morning or evening’ in type. Your proof-readers take away my last ‘g’ terminal in those words always,—therefore making the word or termination New England, southern, etc., etc., but never Hoosier. We say ‘comin' and goin'’ but never, never, never ‘mornin' or evenin'.’30

A less common but nonetheless characteristic Riley device is the dropping of an initial a or [s] in such words as about. On the other hand, the same vowel frequently appears at the beginning of present participles. This usage is still prevalent even today, for Mrs. McDavid reports that present participles with an a prefix are used by over a third of her informants.31 Another significant cluster is made up of words originally ending in -ow, most of which are given -er endings by Riley (feller), but occasionally -or (Shallor Ford) or even -ar (yallar-hammer's32). All of these seem to be phonetically identical.

Further insight into Riley's technique may be gained by comparing the entries here with some of the standard words in the same poems. ‘When the Frost Is on the Punkin,’ for instance, contains about, through, of, and something (instead of possible variants such as 'bout, thro', o', and somethin'). About can be explained on metrical grounds. Through may be a simple slip of the pen; in any event, Riley elsewhere represents the word as eye dialect (which would surely be appropriate in this poem by ‘Benj. F. Johnson’33). Of appears either because of Riley's oversight or because, contrary to his stated aims, he sensed that a transcription as literal as he could make it would be difficult to read. Certainly he realized that under different circumstances one pronounces words differently, but the [v] sound in of, which he drops elsewhere, occurs throughout this particular poem.34 More puzzling still is the metamorphosis of something. This word appeared in the first published version of the poem as somepin, yet later came to be the only -ing word with a g. Perhaps most surprising of all, however, is Riley's consistent retention of the -d in and, not only in this poem but in all the others under consideration. Setting aside the over-all effect which he creates, we may conclude from evidence such as this that Riley's practice was neither wholly consistent nor wholly accurate.

In ‘Morphology and Syntax,’ aside from the verbals with a prefixed a-, one finds a fairly even distribution of nonstandard forms. As one might expect, these include variant verb forms, subject-verb disagreements (but never a singular subject with a plural verb), and various kinds of double negatives. More colorful and less ubiquitous are some of the entries under ‘Idioms and Phrases.’ Here one finds such old-fashioned expressions as rich as all creation, stay the Sunday through, and whole kit-and-bilin'. Similar in effect are some of the terms listed under ‘Vocabulary,’ e.g., back-log's, caseknife, puncheon, and trundle-beds. Probably only the last of these is now widely used, although all are retained in even our smaller dictionaries. Some words—chinkin', od-rot, and wizzen—have become more rare, but rather than wondering at either the profusion or freshness of such expressions, one is inclined to remember Eggleston's observation that Riley's dialect, though accurate, is ‘a little thin.’

The final category, ‘Eye Dialect,’ consists of semiphonetic attempts to indicate universally accepted pronunciation. Perhaps the casual, sympathetic reader gets a real sense of authenticity from atmusfere, hart, and blossum. He is unlikely to be aware that in these five poems Riley writes thro', thrugh, and through. A more critical reader, however, might notice and ask ‘Why?’ When such forms do not imply that Riley was nodding, they may mean that he was using a ruse to persuade people that they were reading dialect when, in fact, they were not, or that he was pretending to write in the manner of Benj. F. Johnson or his compeers. If intending a ruse, he probably succeeded to some degree because so many of his educated readers had smiled at such misspellings in letters from folks back home. When he was trying for a Johnson-like style, however, he may have succeeded in spite of his orthography. Even within a single poem—his ‘Old-fashioned Roses,’ which presumably was written in the language of an ‘old-timer’35—he includes both ust to and used to, and the Old-fashioned of the title becomes old fashion' in the text.

That many expressions in the preceding lists were current in Indiana, both in Riley's time and before, few will doubt. For all of the differences between the two men, one finds Eggleston in The Hoosier Schoolmaster using numerous words which occur in the five Riley poems under examination. As one might expect, Eggleston's hickory-smoked dialect smacks more strongly of the backwoods, but he, too, uses back-log, 'low, tuck (cf. Riley's was tuk), Pap, Mirandy (cf. Riley's Marindy), feller, tomorry, a-comin', wunst (cf. Riley's onc't), etc.

Perhaps even more helpful than Eggleston's work, however, is a glossary of Hoosierisms compiled about 1906 by O. W. Hanley. Lists of expressions current in Indiana today may furnish helpful clues to what Riley was trying to do, but the radio if not the television set has penetrated deeply enough into even the back-farm society of Indiana to preclude any but the most infrequent occurrence of such unadulterated old-time talk.36 Hence the value of a compilation such as Hanley's, which records expressions typical of the then-isolated portions of the Wabash Valley. Words mentioned by Hanley and listed from Riley include 'low, allus, ast, kyarpet, airly (pronounced, says Hanley, ‘with e as in hen’), ef, ellum, feller, jest for ‘just,’ man meaning ‘husband,’ pap for ‘father,’ etc.37

Still another source of information about old-time Hoosier dialect is the correspondence of semiliterate, nineteenth-century Indianians. Here, eventually, one might find all or nearly all the expressions that Riley uses. Certainly one finds many words remindful of Riley's eye dialect—e.g. sed, thay, hartey, and tho. Here, too, are Rileyesque slips in grammar—‘you was’ and ‘we was’ and ‘n[e]ver got … nor.’ Here are country expressions such as ‘cuting … stomach teeth’ and ‘I am coming … abiling.’ And here, too, is the honest reporting of felars, gether, bin, git, thorte, aheep, agoing, saplins, learnt, and fur (for), every one of which was set down by writers as the word sounded to them.38 Of course, many such expressions could be found in contemporary writing from other states, but the point here is simply that they were used both by unself-conscious Indianians and by Riley.

Despite his occasional lapses, Riley's claim to accuracy also tends to be substantiated by the work of modern scholars. Because of the period in which he wrote, of course, evidence probably will remain fragmentary even after the appearance of the long-awaited Atlas of the North-Central States. A. L. Davis, however, makes it clear not only that southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio still retain terms not found elsewhere, but that such Riley words as relations and poison vine are especially common in Indiana.39 Mrs. McDavid furnishes, in addition to evidence already cited, information concerning the use of growed, heerd, run (pret.), tuk, writ, and other forms that appear in the Riley poems analyzed.40

In the lists based on the poems, nonetheless, I have set aside no words as ‘Hoosier.’ The reason is simply that—as the author of The Hoosier Schoolmaster long ago recognized—‘in nothing is the student of American folk-speech so liable to error as in assigning geographical limits to a word or phrase.’41 Riley surely seems accurate enough to justify saying that most of his expressions belong to the main core of rural Indiana speech. He himself realized that no two persons speak a dialect in just the same way, and yet there is an Indiana quality to such words as man (husband), Pap, and gether, and (elsewhere in Farm-Rhymes) hay-rick, pop-paws, and pizenvine.42 The fact remains, however, that Eggleston applied the term ‘Hoosier’ to the language not only of Indiana, but of parts of Ohio, Kentucky, and Illinois;43 even Riley, speaking to a group in Chicago, referred to ‘the dialect that is peculiar to our Western American country’;44 and an Eastern reviewer of Eggleston's Schoolmaster observed coolly that ‘almost none of the dialectic forms was unfamiliar, that none was of much rarity, but all had been very well known as existent.’45 In fact, a sufficiently diligent search will turn up some record of a non-Indiana usage of every Riley expression considered here. From Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, Arkansas, Missouri, and Kansas, from Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, come records of ga'nts, gether, kyarpet, womern, and chinkin'.46 Riley's t'other goes back to a Ben Jonson more rare than he of Boone County, his afore to Shakespeare, and his yit to Chaucer.47 This is not to say that Riley does not use words truly characteristic of Indiana speech, that he does not report Hoosier dialect. But ga'nts and gether do not now and never did stop at the Indiana border. In 1905 two investigators felt ‘compelled to confess … that, in spite of considerable search, they have been unable to find a single provincialism which they would be willing to assert is at present confined to Indiana alone.’48

That the language Riley tried to record is an amalgamation, of course, in no wise affects the quality of his performance. But certain other matters do. Having recognized the more convincing qualities of such a poem as ‘Mylo Jones's Wife,’ one should also consider such matters as Riley's use of the apostrophe. Surely Benj. F. Johnson of Boone would never have written whoopin' nor s'pose unless he was far more wise in the ways of punctuation than his real-life counterparts. At the first appearance of ‘When the Frost Is on the Punkin,’ Johnson made the same literate blunder of writing clackin', cluckin', risin', and appetizin', an error corrected neither in Farm-Rhymes nor in the editions of Riley's collected works in 1913 and 1916. Both in this poem and others the Riley-Johnson use of the hyphen is also questionable; although it is phonetically unobtrusive (as in a-preachin'), I have not yet found it substantiated by the practice of any Hoosier letter writers. Subsequent to the poem's first appearance, moreover, Riley learned that no turkey cock ever ‘kyoucks,’ and yet he continued to refer to ‘the kyouck … of the struttin' turkey-cock.’49 In the same poem, however, he tidily changed its to it's and (as we have seen) somepin to something—perhaps forgetting that in ‘A Tale of the Airly Days’ Johnson was allowed to retain his somepin' from first to last. More understandable—and far more prominent among the revisions which Riley made both here and elsewhere—are those which lead away from literacy. Early becomes airly; blossoms, blossums; rustle, russel; and their, theyr. In the stanza which was added, however, the poet allowed both their and theyr to remain in a single line.

Riley's inflection and phrasing are also important. Part of the effect of a poem like ‘Mylo Jones's Wife’ is achieved by strategic italics and numerous dashes. In such a work Riley suggests a conversational cadence which no analysis of individual words can ever touch. It was an instinct for rightness in such matters which led him to alter ‘night of gracious rest’ to the more natural ‘night of peaceful rest’ in ‘When the Frost Is on the Punkin,’ although the word gracious might seem appropriate in some other Hoosier phrase. Nevertheless, the over-all syntactical authenticity of such poems should in fairness be regarded together with such less convincing locutions as appear in ‘Oldfashioned Roses.’ Perhaps no flesh-and-blood Hoosier farmer would claim, as does the speaker here, that his dying wife's eyes ‘whispered with a smile,’ much less that they gave him burial instructions.50 And perhaps no farmer would say, as does the narrator of ‘How John Quit the Farm,’ ‘I noticed, with a sigh’ or ‘my happiness, that evening, with the settin' sun went down.’51 The colloquial settin' is simply not enough to deceive us into thinking such lines literally authentic.

To deplore the matter, however, especially considering the relative scarcity of this sort of phraseology, is to ignore the basic fact that if Riley had recorded literally the speech of the back-country Hoosiers (as he perhaps thought he was doing), he would not have been able to write in verse at all. It is surely a rare person, Hoosier or otherwise, who speaks in rhymed and rhythmic lines; and possibly it is an even rarer person who would find it a pleasure to struggle through phonetically faithful verse. Of course, Riley's writing was not scientific transcription. It was founded on selection and dependent on suggestion. And considerable tact and insight were involved. It is a bit shortsighted, therefore, to complain that Riley allows one of his farmers to notice something ‘with a sigh.’ The more important fact is that the poem as a whole achieves its effect, ultimately, not in spite of such phrases but partly because of them, or at least because of the principle they represent.

Whatever we may conclude concerning the quality of Riley's verse, there is evidence of various kinds to indicate that by his use of ‘plane words’ he suggested Hoosier speech and suggested it well. Though he was by no means infallible, his own reiterated claim to accuracy is for the most part supported by men and women who knew the dialect at firsthand, by those who observed his working habits, by letters of nineteenth-century Indianians, and by scholarly lists and studies. Riley did not invariably ‘tell of the things jest as they was,’ nor did he really

                    tetch' em up like the poets does,
Tel theyr all too fine fer use!(52)

But touch them up he did. As a writer of verse he could scarcely have done otherwise.

Notes

  1. Clara Laughlin, Reminiscences of James Whitcomb Riley (New York, 1916), p. 108.

  2. Jeannette C. Nolan, ‘Riley as a Children's Poet,’ in Jeannette C. Nolan, Horace Gregory, and James T. Farrell, Poet of the People (Bloomington, Ind., 1951), p. 18.

  3. ‘Books New and Old,’ Atlantic Monthly, 90 (1902), 555.

  4. Quoted by Marcus Dickey, The Maturity of Riley (Indianapolis, 1922), p. 306.

  5. ‘Dialect in Literature,’ Forum, 14 (1892), 465.

  6. Ibid., p. 470.

  7. Ibid., pp. 466-67.

  8. ‘The New Poetry,’ North American Review, 168 (1899), 588.

  9. This and the preceding passages are quoted by William P. Randel (Edward Eggleston [New York, 1946], pp. 184-85) from a manuscript owned by the Columbia University Libraries. Hamlin Garland proclaimed Riley to be a master of dialect (‘A Dialogue between James Whitcomb Riley and Hamlin Garland,’ McClure's Magazine, 2 [1894], 220), and Meredith Nicholson, with only slight reservations, declared that the poet might ‘be followed safely as an accurate guide in the speech of the Southeastern element of the [Indiana] population …’ (The Hoosiers [New York, 1900], p. 163). Bliss Carman, although hardly a Middle Westerner, was a contemporary who observed with some acuity that Riley ‘was really prudish.’ That this characteristic was to be responsible for limiting Riley's faithfulness to life is suggested in Carman's further remark that ‘in all [his] dialect poetry he never used a profane word. He believed firmly in the old-fashioned idea that there should be nothing in literature … that could not be read in the drawing room.’ Nevertheless, Carman, like Howells, ranked Riley with Burns. To him Riley seemed ‘the greatest American poet of our time’ (quoted by Joyce Kilmer, ‘James Whitcomb Riley as a Poet [Carman] Knew Him,’ New York Times, July 30, 1916, Sec. 5, p. 15).

  10. ‘Limestone, Corn, and Literature,’ Saturday Review of Literature, 19 (Dec. 17, 1938), 4.

  11. ‘James Whitcomb Riley: a Victorian American,’ in Nolan, Gregory, and Farrell, op. cit., pp. 43-44.

  12. Indiana Authors and Their Books (Crawfordsville, Ind.), p. 271.

  13. Foreword, Letters of James Whitcomb Riley (Indianapolis, 1930), p. 2; Carman, quoted by Kilmer, p. 15; Charles Virgil Tevis, ‘“Jim” Riley,’ Bookman, 25 (1912), 639; and Anthony and Dorothy Russo, eds., A Bibliography of James Whitcomb Riley (Indianapolis, 1944), p. xii.

  14. ‘James Whitcomb Riley,’ Indiana Magazine of History, 32 (1936), 194-95.

  15. James W Riley as I Knew Him (Greenfield, Ind., 1949), p. 169.

  16. Letters, pp. 28-29.

  17. Ibid., p. 141.

  18. Ibid., p. 178.

  19. Ibid., pp. 68-69.

  20. Garland, op. cit., p. 228. Riley wrote to Robert Browning that he composed ‘in the “Hoosier” idiom—the same as faithfully reproduced as a lifetime's acquaintance with a simple, wholesome people and their quaint vernacular enables me to portray it’ (quoted by Dickey, p. 210).

  21. Mitchell, pp. 182-83.

  22. New York, 1901.

  23. Farm-Rhymes p. 164.

  24. These were, respectively, first printed as follows: Indianapolis Journal, August 5, 1882; Neghborly Poems (Indianapolis, 1891), pp. 55-57; Journal, May 17, 1885; Indianapolis Saturday Herald, June 14, 1879; and Journal, March 7, 1886.

  25. Riley also writes ‘d’ (it would) and ‘they / 'D ort to have’ (they had ought to have).

  26. See also ‘Verbals with Prefixed -a’ under ‘Morphology and Syntax.’

  27. Perhaps a misprint; later altered to ‘Shakespeare's.’

  28. Unpublished dissertation (University of Minnesota, 1956), p. 60.

  29. Edith Wyatt, ‘James Whitcomb Riley,’ New Republic, 8 (1916), 71.

  30. Letters, p. 186.

  31. Loc. cit. Two thirds of those using the form are of the oldest group queried.

  32. The latter example is from ‘Romancin',’ Farm-Rhymes, p. 183. The raising of the schwa sound at the end of furrows, however, changes this word to furries. As A. H. Marckwardt notes, the word dipthery is more common in the region than is diphtheria (‘Folk Speech in Indiana and Adjacent States,’ Indiana History Bulletin, 17 [1940], 129).

  33. In ‘Up and Down Old Brandywine,’ p. 139, and ‘Romancin',’ p. 180, he also gives the forms th'ough and thue.

  34. ‘Poetic license’ is a possible answer—an answer strained to the breaking point when Riley has the old-timer in ‘The Clover’ rhyme plane with again (Farm-Rhymes, p. 106). The latter usually appears as ag'in, and twice, when written again, is rhymed with sin (pp. 127, 132). Usually, it should be noted, Riley's rhymes are true.

  35. Dickey, op. cit., p. 84.

  36. Even in 1905 it was felt that the Hoosier dialect was fading. See, e.g., Paul L. Haworth and O. G. S., ‘Folk-Speech in Indiana,’ Indiana Magazine of History, I (1905), 163.

  37. ‘Dialect Words from Southern Indiana,’ Dialect Notes, 3 (1906), 113-23. Also helpful is the contemporary article by Haworth and O. G. S., op. cit.

  38. These and further examples are found in the letters of William Garrison, apparently a private in the Union Army (1863); James Pierce, who settled in Hamilton County (1860); and George Gegner, a Union soldier, apparently from Alexandria (1864-65). The diary of John Potts, Hamilton County (1864), is also useful. (Writings by Garrison and Pierce are in the Duke University Library; those by Gegner and Potts, in the University of North Carolina Library.)

  39. ‘A Word Atlas of the Great Lakes Region,’ unpublished dissertation (University of Michigan, 1948), pp. 89, 241, 151.

  40. Op. cit., pp. 37, 42, 47-48, 51.

  41. ‘Folk Speech in America,’ Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, 48, N.S. 24 (1894), 874.

  42. Pp. 35, 146.

  43. William P. Randel, ‘Edward Eggleston on Dialect,’ American Speech, 30 (1955), 112.

  44. Quoted by Dickey, op. cit., p. 380.

  45. J. R. Dennett, Nation, 14 (1872), 45.

  46. It would be unprofitable to list all sources investigated for this study. Particularly helpful, however, were W. A. Craigie and James R. Hulbert, eds., A Dictionary of American English (Chicago, 1938-44), and Harold Wentworth, American Dialect Dictionary (New York, 1944).

  47. Although written of Ozark speech, many relevant observations on this subject may be found in the chapter on ‘Survivals of Early English’ in Vance Randolph and George P. Wilson's Down in the Holler (Norman, Okla., 1953). The OED, of course, traces numerous ‘Hoosierisms’ to early English sources.

  48. Haworth and O. G. S., op. cit., pp. 163-72.

  49. Garland (op. cit., p. 222) quotes Riley as saying that ‘sometimes some real country boy gives me the round turn on some farm points. For instance, here comes one stepping up to me: “You never lived on a farm,” he says. “Why not?” says I. “Well,” he says, “a turkey-cock gobbles, but he don't ky-ouck as your poetry says.” He had me right there. It's the turkey-hen that ky-oucks. “Well, you'll never hear another turkey-cock of mine ky-ouckin',” says I.’

  50. One of the few specific comments to be found on Riley's accuracy may refer to this poem. Nicholson (op. cit., p. 163) writes that Riley's slips ‘are few and slight, as the phrase “don't you know,” which does not always ring true …’

  51. Farm-Rhymes, p. 64.

  52. ‘A Tale of the Airly Days,’ Farm-Rhymes, p. 155.

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