'The damp gust makes the ivy whir', (48)
whir rhyming here with executioner.
Since churring (in the first quotation) would automatically preserve its essential trill, the intruder churning is the more obnoxious; and unless the R can be trilled it would seem better for poets to use only the inflected forms of these words, and prefer churreth to churrs.
If churn is anywhere dialectal for churr, it must have come from the common mistake of substituting a familiar for an unknown word: and this is the worst way of making homophones.
2. 'goistering daws'.
Goister or gauster is a common dialect verb; the latter form seems the more common and is recognized in the Oxford Dictionary, where it is defined 'to behave in a noisy boisterous fashion ... in some localities to laugh noisily'. If jackdaws are to appropriate a word to describe their behaviour, no word could be better than goistering, and we prefer goister to gauster. Its likeness to boisterous will assist it, and we guess that it will be accepted. In the little glossary at the end of the book goistering is explained as guffawing. That word is not so descriptive of the jackdaw, since it suggests 'coarse bursts of laughter', and the coarseness is absent from the fussy vulgarity and mere needless jabber of the daw.
3. 'A dor flew by with crackling cry'. (7)
This to the ear is
'A daw flew by with crackling cry';
and though our poet's glossary tells us that dor = dor-hawk or nightjar, it really is not so. A dor is a beetle so called from its making a dorring noise, and the name, like churr and burr, is better with its double R and trill. Dor-hawk may be a name for the nightjar, but properly dorr is not; and if it were, it would be forbidden by daw so long as it neglected its trill. Note also the misfortune that four lines below we read