A Lament For Lost Words

words omitted from the Oxford Junior Dictionary

I was very distressed to read that The Oxford Junior Dictionary had been ‘culling’ words concerning nature’, words like catkin, acorn, cowslip, otter meadow, in order to make room for words like broadband, chatroom, and celebrity. Reading the list of deletions in alphabetical order, as they are presented in the image above, which I first saw taken from Simon Kings wildlife page, I felt there was a poem waiting to be uttered just in the sheer listing, and lost sounds, in these lovely names, so I set them, as they were, and in their order, in this lament.

I have since discovered the source of the list in the image above in an excellent article by Robert McFarlane, who is doing so much to restore the richness and texture of our language and to celebrate our wild places.

As always you can hear it by clicking on the title or the ‘play’ button

A Lament for Lost Words

To graceful names and lovely woods farewell

To acorn, adder, ash, to beech and bluebell,

Farewell old friends I name you in my sonnet

Buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet

Farewell, your fields are brick, our books are barren

No dandelion or fern, hazel or heron

We’ll go no more alone, no more together

The mountain thyme is gone and gone the heather

The clinging ivy‘s gone and soon to go

The kingfisher‘s blue bolt, the mistletoe

Nectar, newt, and otter, pasture, willow

To their last rites my muse comes footing slow

We’ll hear no more the heaven-scaling lark

We’ll all go down together in the dark.