River Severn - Literary Allusions

Literary Allusions

The River Severn is named several times in A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad (1896): “It dawns in Asia, tombstones show/And Shropshire names are read;/And the Nile spills his overflow/Beside the Severn’s dead” (“1887”); “Severn stream” (“The Welsh Marches”); and “Severn shore” (“Westward from the high-hilled plain…”).

In William Shakespeare's "Henry IV, Part 1," Henry Hotspur Percy recalls the valor of Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March in a long battle against Welshman Owain Glyndŵr upon The Severn's banks, claiming the flooding Severn "affrighted with (the warriors') bloody looks ran fearfully among the trembling reeds and hid his crisp head in the hollow bank, bloodstained with these valiant combatants."