plash

There were some curly questions, too, that might give a seasoned scholar pause today (let alone a student), like the following: 'In what respects does the historical play you have studied differ from fact?' or 'Where are Ely House, Plashy, Langley and Berkeley?', or the devastatingly simple (and revealing) question: 'Is Shakespeare typically English?'

Hoo far is't Te waak te toon - this clarty road an' plashy weathor?

In "Moyulla," for example, the poet balances against the "long centrifugal haulage of speed" not of a machine but of a river into which he has waded, redressing her: "to walk up to the bib/upstream, in the give and take/of her deepest, draggiest purchase,/ countering, parting,//getting back at her, sourcing/her and your plashy sell" (59).

Painting on a smaller scale than Claude and Poussin, Ruisdael gives us blasted oaks, a plashy stream, rubbed red brickwork, all observed through the eye of a sheep.

(Interestingly, York's report of Gaunt's death shortly after this speech contains another echo of Psalm 137: "His tongue is now a stringless instrument' [2.1.149].) This "fall" of England is also represented in terms of the fall of Jerusalem in act 1 scene 2, when Gloucester's widow mourns her fallen manor (Plashy, with its appropriately watery name), expressing her own bereavement, and, by extension, that of the realm - - all due to Richard's sins: Alack, and what shall good old York there see But empty lodgings and unfurnish'd walls, Unpeopled offices, untrodden stones, And what hear there for welcome but my groans?

The topicality of the book, reviewed on a day when the government announced plans for the construction of a fourteen-lane motorway across the middle of Surrey, is dramatically evident in a quotation from the Excursion: |The foot-path faintly marked, the horse-track wild, And formidable length of plashy lane ...