Soils and poetry

A list was drawn up of some famous poems which have references to soil in them! Counting where "soil" was used gave 53 instances. Guess which word rhymes most with "soil"? Yes, you guessed right - it's "Toil" (36 references). Here they are:

"His peasant's parents killed themselves with toil
To let their darling leave a stingy soil"
W.H.Auden (1907-1973) in The Quest

Of the 30 poets involved, 20 have used 'toil', though few of them probably had much hands-on experience of the stuff, or knew of soil erosion and land degradation! But George Crabbe (1754-1832) had been a farm labourer and he knew rural poverty.

"There poppies nodding, mock the hole of toil;
There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil."
The Village The urban T.S.Eliot (1888-1965), whose hands were never callused, borrowed Crabbe's imagery -

"The parched eviscerated soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil"
(Four Quartets)

Robert Frost (1874-1963), a New Englander who had been a farmer, knew about soil erosion.

"Let the downpour roil and toil!
The worst it can do to me
Is carry some garden soil
A little nearer the sea."
(In Time of Cloudburst)

Gordon Bottomley (1874-1948), in To Ironfounders and Others, showed what soil fauna can do.

"The generations of the worms
Know not your loads piled on their soil;
Their knotted ganglions shall wax firm
Till your strong flagstones heave and toil."

So far - you can see that clearly 'soil' and 'toil' are good rhyming words! In the 15 other rhyming instances noted, 11 different words are paired with "soil" : Boyle (in an epistle to a man of that name), foil, trefoil, fill (stretching it rather!), Nile (stretching it even more!), boil -

"White foam crested with the russet soil
As washed from new ploughed lands would dart beneath
Then round and round a thousand eddies boil"
The Flood by John Clare, "the peasant poet" (1793-1864).

The list ends with, oil, spoil, embroil, recoil, droil (drudgery) -

"But the man who works the wet and weeping soil
Down in the Wealds, must marl and delve the till
This three-horse land, fearing not sweat nor droil."
The Land by Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962).

It's doubtful whether she ever saw anyone cultivating the Weald Clays when they were "wet and weeping"!

So much for rhyming, but here's a piece to show that there is nothing new under the sun!

"How can I stay and overlook a land
where water hurried
and sand-grouse scurried,
top-soil and all my people gone?"
Abid Ibn Al Abras (c. 500-550).