ABSTRACT
To his contemporary reviewers, Edward Capern, the rural Postman of Bideford, was so much a poet of locale that he seems, like a much mellowed Heathcliff, to be integral to the landscape. Capern, apparently, did not chafe much against his limitations and in this respect has indeed become that rara avis—a ‘self-taught working-man poet whose work did not cause him any great anguish, and seems instead to have brought him modest pleasure and slight celebrity’. The success of his first volume was assured by the massive popularity of 'The Lion-Flag of England', a poem that sets the Crimean conflict within an ancient lineage of divinely-sanctioned English victories. Several volumes of verse followed, including Ballads and Songs (1858), Wayside Warbles (1865) and Sungleams and Shadows (1881). The second of these contains Capern’s grieving lyrics on the loss of his young child, Milly.
