Word of the Week: Drought

Another seasonally appropriate word this week:

drought
\ˈdrau̇t\

Traveling in the Pacific Northwest a couple of months ago, we were shocked at how profligate people were with water. There was nary a low-flow showerhead in sight. Leaks went unattended for weeks. The city of Portland drained a 93 million gallon reservoir because some kid peed in it! More than once!

We were gobsmacked--these people were acting as if water just falls magically from the sky!

We don’t think that way. We empty our water bottles onto the potted plants. We keep buckets in the tub to collect the running water while the shower heats up. When Grimbert was small, he walked outside one day and discovered that it was raining. He looked up into the sky, puzzled, and said: “Bath?” He didn’t know what it was. We live in a place where a child can learn to walk and talk before ever getting rained on. 

Drought is a word we know well. 

It comes from the Old English drūgað (meaning drought, dryness, or desert) and drūgian, to dry up. Related to the Old English drȳge, or dry. 

By Famartin (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

Looking over the OED's usage notes, I was struck that they included a couplet from Tennyson’s 1832 poem “Fatima.” Which is far from dry. In fact it is one of the most fabulous bodice-clutching heavy-breathing poems you are likely to find in any Great Works anthology. 

The speaker is achingly, obsessively in love with a fella. She has throbbings, and shudderings, and “shafts of flame” that pierce through her body whenever she hears his name until she actually “bursts into blossom” right there in front of everybody. 

No, really!

Here’s Fatima hanging out by the city walls of an evening:

I thirsted for the brooks, the showers: 

I roll'd among the tender flowers: 

       I crush'd them on my breast, my mouth; 

       I look'd athwart the burning drouth 

       Of that long desert to the south. 



For some reason the OED is not interested in the young lady rolling about in the flowerbeds in paroxysms of desire, gnawing on the daisies. No, they include only the final two lines of the stanza, because that’s where you find what’s REALLY interesting about this poem: the word “drought,” arrayed this time in its more obscure and poetic form of “drouth,” which Tennyson presumably chose because it goes with “south” and “mouth.”

“Drought,” on the other hand, rhymes with “trout.”

I personally think “trout” makes for a much sexier rhyme. If Fatima is swooning all over the place like this, she may need more sustenance than she’s getting from a diet of longing and houseplants. A little snack could set her up nicely. And I will attest that my husband’s grilled trout wrapped in bacon makes people burst into blossom with some regularity.

Just imagine--it could go something like this:

I thirsted for the brooks, the showers: 

I roll'd among the tender flowers: 

       When from across the burning drought
       A heavnly odor wafted out
       Of bacon close entwin’d with trout.

But alas poor Fatima is stuck with drouth. And we Californians are stuck with drought, as we are excruciatingly aware. Perhaps that’s why this time I read the poem I came up short against a bit I'd never noticed before:

The wind sounds like a silver wire, 

And from beyond the noon a fire 

Is pour'd upon the hills…

Well. If that’s not an accurate depiction of the last week here, I don’t know what is. So perhaps the investigators who are trying to figure out what caused this past week’s fires should stop focusing on arsonists and backhoes and keep an eye peeled for lovestruck women in the chapparal.

Because Fatima’s drought seems a long way from breaking. At the end of the poem she is left hanging “naked in a sultry sky” and vowing that she will possess her lover or die trying. But it’s clear this is going nowhere. She said so earlier herself:

Before he mounts the hill I know
He cometh quickly.

Poor girl.

Stick with the trout.