THE BRIDGE AT HOUGH
And this poem, which will be about England,
and, in some part, the southern margins
of the North, and the vagaries of the tongue,
has already stalled at the title’s fourth word.
Does it rhyme with ‘though’ or ‘tough? Or with ‘cow’
or ‘row’? That is ‘row’ as in beans, of course,
not as in a shouty altercation.
It is as in ‘huff’, ‘houfe’, ‘hoff’ – from the Old English
for the heel of a hill, a projecting ridge.
As you drive through the ancient hamlet,
you do not notice any raised ground or,
indeed, the place – scattered by the road
to the Potteries – but for the signs on leaving
and entering. At one end of the hamlet –
that on the eastern edge of Cheshire –
is the bridge itself: narrow, stone, hump-backed,
replaced and repaired since medieval times.
Beneath the bridge – famed now in the annals
of English verse! – runs Swill Brook, and along
its reedy banks are endangered colonies
of water voles: aka water rats,
rats taupier, arvicola
amphibius. The brook springs limpid
from the clayey earth some miles south, seeps
northwards into the River Weaver’s catchment,
and so into the Mersey, past Liverpool,
through St George’s Channel to the Atlantic.
England’s mercantile empire shoved its
Anglo-Saxon tongue – complete with French veneer
and Greco-Roman embellishments –
down the throats of millions.
Elise Oliver
July 29, 2023For some reason I thought Michael Rosen had written this.
David Selzer
July 30, 2023What a compliment! Thank you.
Hugh Powell
July 31, 2023Putting politics and conquest aside, I think this is a compliment to the English language. Demonstrably international, as you describe, it has borrowed and compromised its way into its status as a world tongue, learned and loved for its flexibility and its refusal to insist on absolute syntactical regularity, together with its wonderful ambiguities, and its heritage of writers and thinkers. It is the chosen language of David Selzer, whose international audience, also speaking it, derives much pleasure and satisfaction from knowing and reading him!
Elise Oliver
July 30, 2023It should be signed off: ‘Rats arvicola, Boris’