Steve,
I like reading yr poem. I keep reading it.

And it really reminds me of the style and wit of 18th Century English verse.
Its pastoral lament seems similar to Goldsmith where he recognised the
ending of rural ways of life with the advent of industrialisation. (Then
came Wordsworth & Coleridge advocating a new approach to language in poems
and a more personalised approach to the world around us). Have you thought
of acknowledging the period even further in the style and form you’re using?
Maybe developing the way sound works at the end of lines - no need for the
rhyming COUPLETS that dominated what most people seem to read and remember
from that century - but something a bit more subtle, some sound patterns
that develops what you’re doing with the words you’re using anyway. I’m
thinking that because a good few line endings resonate with each other and
satisfy the ear already. Your half-rhymes have a lingering sadness that
would be lost if stronger rhymes were found. Subtle poem, subtle sounds. Let
the poem be like the hedge: not revealing it’s details, hiding things, yet –
as your  poem is – there with its complexities and simpleness of just being
there.

I’m also thinking it seems a shame to end such a vividly “active and visual”
poem (and a poem that plays with the almost lost words of our language so
well) with such an abstract last word. I feel as if I don’t want to be
“told” what I may discover for myself.

If you think you may follow Joanne’s comment and think of the birds – and
the wildlife - (hedges are council estates for birds and motorways for
rodents!) then a quick skeg at John Clare’s poems, where he describes living
things and their environs so sensitively, may be enjoyable too (but his use
of, and way of choosing, words isn’t the same as yours).

And, because you are describing the hedge in the first lines anyway you may
be able to do something with the title (I sense I’m being told it’s a hedge
twice!). But there’s plenty people do that, and, in the end, this may be a
poem that can do no other... But it’s a possibility for tightening this up
(and maybe getting into the poem, like Pushkin advocated, as if the first
act of a play has already started).

Bob



>From: Steve Rudd <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: New sub: the Domesday Hedge
>Date: Sat, 8 Sep 2001 00:04:15 +0100
>
>This is about a hedge near our office. I doubt it really is a Domesday
>Hedge (though there ARE some, in the English Landscape), it's probably
>about 18th century, but it just seemed a good metaphor for the way a lot of
>things have been changed this year. Apologies if you knew this already but
>the "Bishop's Terrier" mentioned, is an ecclesiastical land survey (Terrare
>= land) not a holier-than-thou Jack Russell. Pity.
>The Domesday Hedge
>
>Nine hundred and fifteen is the age of the hedge
>
>Numbered by nine hundred winters' blast,
>
>By those same summers, sap-fed:
>
>It has been storm-tossed, wind-ruffled, rain-drenched,
>
>With its white webs autumn-dancing with dew:
>
>And mouse and shrew scampering beneath, squeak and patter,
>
>Feet rustling the years past, their poor small bones
>
>Becoming lost white patterns on leaf-mould
>
>Dappling the meadow paddock each autumn
>
>As the wind moans and the Keck nods its Queen Anne Lace
>
>Over strip, ridge and furrow, over the dun fallows watched by owls,
>
>Where Ealdormen rode the lanes to the whale-road,
>
>Counting your yards and furlongs, marking plough turns and headlands.
>
>While branches swung, heavy with dawn-birds, your lines were
>
>Enumerated by Thanes, grain-boundaries scratched on vellum,
>
>Demesned and enclosed, sake, soc, and quitrent,
>
>Rogation-beaten, part of the Bishop's Terrier,
>
>Boxing fields tilled by Shires with chestnut-buffed tackle.
>
>Bordered by lost generations of cow-parsley,
>
>Michelmas, Candlemas, Plough-Mondayed, and moon-wintered.
>
>
>* * *
>
>How many more Springs, I wonder, will we see
>
>You quarter the field of vert proper, its fleurs-de-lys green-laid
>
>With your traceried escutcheon; now that a new plague
>
>Blackens your land, and shepherds pipe a bitter eclogue?
>
>And has the Norman's misnomer come home to roost at last, come true,
>
>As the smoke rises over silent byres, over dung still body-warm,
>
>And you become less of a hedge, an edge, and more anachronism?
>
>
>


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