Here churning is a mistake; we are sorry to begin with an animadversion, but the word should be churring. #Churr# is an echo-word, and though there may be examples of echo-words which have been bettered by losing all trace of their simple spontaneous origin, this is not one.  It is like burr, purr, and whirr; and these words are best spelt with double R and the R should be trilled.  The absurdity of not trilling this final R is seen very plainly in burr, because that word’s definition is ‘a rough sounding of the letter R.’  This is not represented by the pronunciation b[schwa]:.  What that ’southern English’ pronunciation does indicate is the vulgarity and inconvenience of its degradations. Burr occurs in these poems: 

  ‘There the live dimness burrs with droning glees’. (23)

#Burr# is, moreover, a bad homophone and cannot neglect possible distinctions:  the Oxford Dictionary has eight entries of substantives under burr.

Our author also uses whirr: 

  ‘And the bleak garrets’ crevices
  Like whirring distaffs utter dread’, (26)

and again of the noise of wind in ivy, on p. 54, and

  ‘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’;