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.
By David Selzer