HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE H0036 4/12/00 "HARDY'S USE OF THE WORD SPRAY". ======================================================== From: "Patrick Roper" Subject: The word 'spray' Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 19:21:07 +0100 We recently discussed Hardy's usage of the word 'spray' meaning 'twigs' in his poem 'When I set out for Lyonnesse' (he said 'The rime was on the spray'). I came across this same usage in The Woodlanders:- "Hundreds of fagots, and divers lots of timber, had been set down to him, when all he had required had been a few bundles of spray for his odd man Robert Creedle's use in baking and lighting fires." I must say I have never heard or seen this expression being used by anyone other than TH and wonder if it was widespread and, maybe, still current in Dorset. Patrick Roper ========== Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 15:12:50 -0400 From: Rosemarie Morgan Subject: Re: The word 'spray' Hmmmmmmmm..interesting! It's not in Wilkinson Sherren's 1908 list of Dorset dialect words, nor in the Oxford Reader's Companion to Hardy: Glossary of dialect words. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary says it is obscure and cites Hardy's own usage of "spray" in *The Woodlanders,* so it must have been exceptional, as you suspect, although it does go back as far as 1297: OED says, "Small or slender twigs of trees or shrubs, either as still growing or as cut off and used for fuel, etc., fine brushwood." Where on earth did Hardy FIND these obscure words? Rosemarie ========== From: brown@jc.edu Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 15:42:18 -0500 Subject: Re: The word 'spray' But the usage isn't quite the same, is it? "[B]undles of spray" makes "spray" sound like kindling; surely "The rime was on the spray" doesn't mean the rime was on the kindling. In an earlier post I cited a "I sing of a maiden." Here's "Alisoun": "Bitwene Mersh and Averil / When spray biginneth to springe." And here's Arnold's "Scholar-Gypsy": "Rapt, twirling in thy hand a withered spray, / And waiting for the spark from heaven to fall." The usage sounds literary in "When I Set Out for Lyonnesse"; in *The Woodlanders* it sounds more dialectical. Mark Brown ========== Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 10:25:02 -0700 From: Betty Cortus Subject: Re: The word 'spray' > Where on earth did Hardy FIND these obscure words? > > Rosemarie Out of curiosity I wondered just how frequently, and with what different meanings, Hardy used the word "spray." I looked first of all in F.B.Pinion's _A TH Dictionary_ and "Ralph Elliott's _TH's English_. Neither of them wrote about the word at all. next I went to Martin Ray's invaluable Concordance of the poetry, and found eight citations for "spray," one for "sprays," and two for "sprayed." Not very many I thought. He uses it for the vegetable as well as the liquid variety of spray. Just to give a couple of examples: "In a Wood" refers to the unequivocally vegetable kind when he asks the trees: "Why mar sweet comradeship / Blighting with poison drip / Neighbourly spray?" In "Overlooking the River Stour" a moor-hen is obviously [p]laning up shavings of crystal spray" of the liquid variety. Some uses are more ambigious. In "Once at Swanage" the line "The spray sprang up across the cusps of the moom," an argument could be made for either interpretation. Betty Cortus hardycor@mailhost2.csusm.edu ========== Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 14:18:34 -0400 From: Rosemarie Morgan Subject: Re: The word 'spray' Yes--the Swanage "spray" is rather ambiguous although (trying to picture this) wouldn't one have to be lying down on the beach (or rocks to see sea-spray springing "up across the cusps of the moon" -- ? On another tack, I had never, in fact, thought the sprigly sort of "spray" to be rare usage given that (in my childhood) men and women would wear a "spray" of tiny flowers on their lapels on formal occasions. Customarily, my father would roam the garden in the mornings to find a "spray" -- a carnation, pinks, or rosebuds --to fasten in his buttonhole. Rosemarie ========== Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 11:54:54 -0700 From: Betty Cortus Subject: Re: The word 'spray' >Yes--the Swanage "spray" is rather ambiguous although (trying to picture >this) wouldn't one have to be lying down on the beach (or rocks to see >sea-spray springing "up across the cusps of the moon" -- ? However, Rosemarie, suppose the moon were very low over the horizon, and a wave dashing against a rock or something sprayed up between it and the viewer. After all line 5 does say "Roaring high and roaring low was the sea." On the other hand, line two describes the spray springing up and making the moon's light turn green, which could at at stretch, mean the spray is one of greenery, except that vegetation could hardly spring up actively by itself, it would have to be passively pushed up by some force like the wind. Right now I'm now leaning toward the idea of ocean spray. Betty ========== Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 15:32:31 -0400 From: Rosemarie Morgan Subject: Re: The word 'spray' Yes-- I agree. Especially since the spot where Hardy stayed in Swanage -- called Peveril Point -- (this is not to say that this poem was written at that same time) was situated at the very end of the bay where it is rocky--very rocky: legend goes that the wreck of a Viking ship lies there under the sea. cheers, Rosemarie ========== From: "Patrick Roper" Subject: RE: The word 'spray' Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 10:02:05 +0100 What strikes me as curious about TH's use of the word 'spray' in a vegetable sense is that it is a word still quite commonly used in English in England as a singular noun: "I've brought you a spray of flowers from the garden", for example, but not as a collective noun. I have only come across it in this second, collective sense in TH's writing, i.e. 'the spray' (meaning heaps of twigs or twiggy bushes) as we use the term 'the grass' (i.e. lots of grass). Having been an enthusiastic naturalist all my life I am sure I would have come acoss 'the spray' as a collective noun if it were at all widely used, which is what makes me wonder if it is Dorset dialect in TH's work. Patrick Roper ==========