Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 23 May 2009

Dot Wordsworth flips

issue 23 May 2009

William Barnes, that remarkable Dorset schoolmaster turned rector, with his buckled shoes and knee-breeches, and eccentric ideas on the English language, wrote a poem on milking time:

I come along where wide-horn’d cows,

’Ithin a nook, a-screen’d by boughs,

Did stan’ an’ flip the white-hoop’d païls

Wi’ heäiry tufts o’ swingèn taïls.

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