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                  PLACE-NAMES AND POETRY

A village in the County of Avon gave me my surname.  Place-name experts warn one not to jump to conclusions about the original meanings of the names of towns, villages, rivers, mountains, fields and the rest.  Many names have been around for 1000 years or more, and in that time our language has changed.  So have local pronunciations and spellings.  ‘Field’, for instance, from AS (Anglo-Saxon) feld, once meant ‘open space’, that is ‘land’.  ‘Marsh’ could have come from OE mersc (marsh), but the landscape and history around the Avon village makes it more likely that the ‘marsh’ in ‘Marshfield’ came from the AS mearc or ‘boundary’.  So the name probably meant ‘land on the boundary’. — ‘Considering its elevation and soil type, the first [suggestion, “marsh”] seems inappropriate, whereas the Cotswold ridge on which the village stands was the boundary line between the Saxon kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia.’¹ 

One north-west London suburb-village next to where I live is Hendon.  In 975AD this was written Heandun, from AS dative hēan (from hēah, ‘high’) and dūn, ‘down’ or ‘hill’.  My Hendon meant ‘place by the high down’.  The Hendon in Tyne and Wear, however, was in 1382 written Hynden and came from AS hind and denu, together meaning ‘valley frequented by hinds’.

 Like fossils of most kinds, place-names are therefore to be interpreted with care but wondered at for the glimpses they give of (1) types of settlement, like Hamton (hām-tūn), ‘home farm’; (2) landscape features, like Oxford (Oxna-forda), ‘ford used by oxen’; and (3) tribal seats, like Ripon, ‘territory of the Hrype tribe’.

Anglo-Saxon had almost as many words for different types of high ground as the Inuit are said to have for snow.  The Oxford Dictionary of Place-names (A.D. Mills, OUP, 1991) lists dūn, hyll, hrycg, hōh, hēaford, ofer and hyrst, and all these can be found in place-names: Hendon, Hillam, Ridge, Hoe, Greenhead, Over, Herstmonceux respectively.

Invasions are written into the landscape.  When the Celts were forced out by the Anglo-Saxons from the 5^th century on, only a few Celtic settlement-names were retained, e.g. Dover, Carlisle, and rather more Celtic river-names, like Thames, Avon, Trent.

The Danish and Norwegian occupations of the North and East, from the 9^th century on, changed local names to suit the Viking pronunciation.  In old Middlesex, now Greater London, ‘Cheese Farm’ was Ceswican (Chiswick); in Cumbria it was Kesewic (Keswick).

The invading Normans imposed the names of great families (their tribes) on existing features, e.g. Herstmonceux, the wooded hill of the Monceux family.

Before I come to place-names and poetry, let me say that I was led into this essay by thinking about street names near where I live.  A few of these go back at least 500 years to when it was all countryside.  The tracks were Lanes or Ways or Hills: Hale Lane, Marsh Lane, The Ridgeway, Holcombe Hill, Milespit Hill (‘Miles Pit’ says one old map, not as we say it now, ‘Mile-spit’).  The first element in such names would usually be a person’s name: Marsh of ‘Marsh Lane’ was a local landowner, Richard Marsh, who bought land in 1610.  Likewise Daw in ‘Daws Lane’ and Flower in ‘Flower Lane’ were surnames.² 

When the fields exchanged harvests for commuter housing in the 1920s and 30s, the building firms, or the local planning office, ensured that some new street-names still came from surnames (council archivists and librarians would also offer field names to choose from).  When planners run out of time, ideas or advice, they turn to whimsy.  On a council estate in Hampshire, my parents lived for a spell in a street called Hazelholt Drive, and you can’t get much fancier than that.  Near where I live, the new Mill Hill ‘Garden Suburb’ had already in 1910 been endowed with a ‘poets’ corner’ where a bunch of streets are named after Byron, Tennyson, etc.

And how many substitutes there are for ‘Street’!  Avenue, Buildings, Close, Corner, Crescent, Cross, Drive, Gardens, Green, Grove, Hill, Lane, Mead, Oval, Park, Place, Rise, Road, Terrace, View, Walk, Way, Yard, are common.  As if these weren’t enough to choose from, planners find even more exotic street-substitutes, or they drop the street idea altogether.  Here are some I’ve picked from a list (not of Mill Hill places):

Alanbrooke, Brownsbank Cottages, Byram Arcade, Crossways, Dulwich Village, Eastfield, Frosty Hollow, Glen Chass, Lineacre, Old Whitehill, The Mount, The Triangle, Trinity Chare, West Borough.  I didn’t intend to get soppy about the poetry of place-names, but there’s a cornucopia here, overbrimming!

Where I wanted this to lead, or hoped it would, was to the naming of parts, as in gadgets, appliances, architecture etc, and hence to the naming (or via metaphor, the avoidance of direct naming) that goes on in poetry.  Here, for instance, from one of my picture dictionaries,³ are the parts of a microphone:

diaphragm, magnet, housing, jack plug, cable, connector, on/off switch, moving coil, windscreen (yes!).

As a poet I always have an uneasy feeling that unless I can name a thing I am not really connecting with it.  Or put it another way: if I knew its name I’d connect better.  I have a frustrating time in the garden, for though I went though a nerdy boyhood phase of scouring the countryside with a nature book, discovering how to name the Red Admiral butterfly, the Bee Orchid, and how to tell the difference between Spruce and Larch, I wander out the back door today and into a world where every bush has a triple-barrelled endorsement in Latin.  And often that’s all it has!  The sort of Latin they never teach at school.

So what do poets do about naming?  Well, of course they either do the Vox⁴ thing and get nouns exactly right, in what is usually called ‘lean’ writing, or they lace their work with comparisons, which is still acceptable practice, except that it mustn’t be too oblique (see essay Obliquity and Minimalism).  How does this relate to place-names?  About place-names one can say:

• They name tribal areas, villages, dwellings, paths, streams, hills, enclosures (and the larger versions of these).

• Early forms are plain, utilitarian, signifying places like High Hill, John’s Farm.

• However, in so many cases, time has worn away all appearance of the old meaning and more often than not we have a label, a word which has no other function in our language (Marrick, Tadlow, Croglin, the list would be endless).

• Later forms may be more fanciful or playful, as in Hazelholt Drive (on a Hampshire council estate, middle 20^th cent.), Gropecuntelane (in the Southwark brothel area, early 13^th cent.).

Now to poetry.

• To make a rough list of things we can say about naming things in poems, let’s look at one, for instance this by Thomas Hardy, God’s Education:

• As in all types of discourse, in poetry we name what we think of as ‘things’, abstract or concrete, real or imagined.

• Pronouns are types of noun.  In the poem above the most common is ‘I’.  A poet often takes it upon himself partially to skew the personal, to speak for a special sort (here a man who loves), or even for everyone.

I saw him steal the light away   

     That haunted in her eye

It went so gently none could say

More than it was there one day

     And missing by-and-by.

I watched her longer, and he stole

     Her lily tincts and rose;

All her young sprightliness of soul

Next fell beneath his cold control,

     And disappeared like those.

 I asked: “Why do you serve her so?

     Do you, for some glad day,

 Hoard these her sweets - ?”  He said, “O no,

 They charm not me; I bid Time throw

     Them carelessly away.”

 Said I: “We call that cruelty -

     We, your poor mortal kind.”

 He mused.  “The thought is new to me.

 Forsooth, though I men’s master be,

     Theirs is the teaching mind!”

• One can try and name even that which is nameless, which the wisest after millennia have said it is impossible to adorn with attributes, namely what is here called ‘God’.  Moreover, Hardy makes familiar what is most unfamiliar by telling a story, or an allegory, using personification.

Now, concealed in a few place-names, too, there are bound to be words which also attest to the sacred: Hollingworth (AS holegn worth, ‘holy enclosure’), Wednesfield (AS for ‘Woden’s patch’), Chrishall (AS Crist halh, ‘nook dedicated to Christ’).

• Another person is mentioned by pronoun, the poet’s wife, in the genitive and accusative ‘her’.  A great deal of emotion adheres to pronouns that refer to the beloved.  The same can apply to anything invoked by a mere ‘it’, like a river, mountain, house or motor car.  It takes special poetic gifts, and the auras of fashion, to make inanimate things emotionally arousing.  In more figurative language, nouns amplify emotions (‘ . . . To take up arms against a sea of troubles . . .’).

• It is not usually very hard to tell whether things are named directly or allusively.  Here is a possible list with reference to the Hardy poem.

—It’s noticeable that even in the ‘direct’ column there is very little that is just the naming of simple things.  ‘Her eye’ means literally her eye(s), of course, but it also borders on synecdoche, a part (of her beauty) for the whole of it.  Synecdoche is close to label and even cliché (‘the turf’ for horse racing, for example), and as such it wanders away from the thing itself.

—‘One day’ (and ‘by-and-by’) actually name aspects of time, but are used adverbially, and anyway even when Time gets mentioned in person (as part of the allegory here), it is by its very nature insubstantial.  Time is ungraspable; so much so that some thinkers serious doubt its existence.

—The lady’s complexion comes out as a fancy poeticism (‘tinct’) supported by other rather overdone symbols of beauty, lily and rose (used adjectivally).

• Everywhere the nouns are or tend towards abstractions: ‘sprightliness’, ‘control’, ‘glad day’, ‘Time’, ‘cruelty’, ‘mortal kind’, ‘the thought’, ‘men’s master’, ‘the teaching mind’.  It hardly needs reiterating: in this poem, even where the language is allusive, there is not much concrete ‘naming of parts’.  It’s a poem I’ve always liked, though more for the music, the sentiment and the first half than for the figure of God, a nonchalant Senior Common Room debater conceding a point of logic.

Comparing poetic language with place-names

• If we think some place-names ‘poetic’ (Nettlestone, Upper Slaughter, Toller Porcorum, for example),⁵ we must admit that in most cases place-names, even if pretty, are so allusive in what they ‘mean’ that they might as well have been written in a foreign language.  In most cases they were.  Even people who learn Anglo-Saxon at university soon forget it.

• There is obliquity, then, in place-names.  And it’s harder than most obliquity in poetry, but for different reasons.  Unless the poet is writing a Finnegans Wake of a poem, or is writing in Gaelic or Welsh, our difficulty with his or her writing does not usually come from a total unfamiliarity with the lexicon.  It comes from cryptic references, unusual structure and complexities of voice.

• Most place-names in English are compounds, usually of two words, the first qualifying the second, e.g. Hendon (hēan + dūn), Chiswick (cīese + wīc), Oxford (oxna + ford).  English still forms compounds easily (scot-free, highbrow, pussy-whipped), though strangely enough the experiments with invented compounds in Hopkins and Joyce did not catch on.  The presence of too many new compounds in a poem is generally, I believe (though I don’t think so myself), considered cloggy and barbarous.  If only Eliot and Pound had not been so in love with the Romance languages!

This ramble through place-names shows again that we don’t write poetry in a very Anglo-Saxon way.  There is now, as much as ever, a strong Norman feeling around that Anglo-Saxon words are blunt and unrefined.  We do not go into a restaurant and order a pig schnitzel or a rack of sheep or a cow hamburger done bloody as hell.  When Conrad Aiken wrote melodiously he used Latinate words like susurrus.  Pity.

Poets name things either (1) as precisely as possible or (2) obliquely, figuratively.  Here is another example from Hardy, the well-known Weathers.

This is the weather the cuckoo likes,

              And so do  I;

When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,

              And nestlings fly:

And the little brown nightingale bills his best,

And they sit outside at “The Travellers’ Rest,”

And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest,

And citizens dream of the south and west,

              And so do I.

This is the weather the shepherd shuns,

              And so do I;

When beeches drip in browns and duns,

              And thresh and ply;

And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe,

And meadow rivulets overflow,

And drops on gate-bars hang in a row,

And rooks in families homeward go,

              And so do I.

‘Best’ and ‘south and west’ are intangible.  A few nouns, e.g. citizens, since they are more in the class-naming business than are gate-bars, teeter between ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’.  But most nouns here, even if used adjectivally (chestnut) or adverbially (sprig-muslin) are decidedly thingy.

Obliquity is scarce, it pops up in a few verbs (‘bills’, and perhaps ‘throb’ and even ‘betumble’).  But look at the nouns in this piece.  I think this is the lot:

weather, cuckoo, showers, (chestnut), spikes, nestlings, (brown), nightingale, best, “The Travellers’ Rest”, maids, (sprig-muslin), citizens, south, west, shepherd, beeches, browns, duns, (hill), tides, throe, (meadow), rivulets, drops, gate-bars, row, rooks, families.

How unlike the first Hardy!

Alan Marshfield

¹ Monograph, The Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin, Marshfield, Short History and Guide (H.W.Hayes and J.E.Walter, 1992).  (back)

² All information about Mill Hill street names have so far come mostly from Mill Hill, A Thousand Years of History (R.Calder, Angus Hudson Ltd).  (back)

³ Bildwörterbuch (J-C. Corbeil & A.Archambault, Ernst Klett Verlag, Stuttgart-Dresden, 1992), for example.  (back)

⁴ Vox (Random; Granta; 1992) by Nicholson Baker, precision artist.  (back)

⁵ There is no nettle or slaughter here, but a nut pasture farm (hnutu læs tūn) and mud (slōhtre).  Porcorum ‘of the pigs’ is a rare joke among place-names, contrasting this part of River Toller (now River Hooke) with one called Toller Fratrum (‘of the holy brothers’).  (back)

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