I didn’t want my post on rails and crakes to suffer from poetry bloat, so I didn’t quote it before, but John Clare isn’t the only Dead Famous English Poet who mentioned corncrakes in a poem.
This is the mowing scene from Upon Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax by Andrew Marvell. I went through modernising [...]
Posts tagged with ‘corncrake’
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More crakery from the canon
9 March 2007 – 2:57 pm
Birding the dictionary 2
5 March 2007 – 4:28 pm
I’ve been investigating more avian etymologies, looking for things of interest. There isn’t much to say about most bird names, because they’re self-explanatory (oystercatcher, wagtail) obviously onomatopoeic (chiff-chaff), or just dead-ends. For example, checking up on ‘merlin’, the dictionary says:
merlin (mɜ:lın). ME. [– AFr. merilun, aphet. f. OFr. esmerillon (mod. émerillon), augment. of esmeril :– [...]