Name The Shirt: Roman Curse Tablets And The Craft Of Writing Grief
Around a hundred and thirty lead tablets were dropped into the hot spring at Bath, asking a goddess for justice. She never answered. They survived anyway. The reason why is the most useful thing I know about writing loss.
Two thousand years ago, someone stood at the edge of a steaming pool in Somerset, scratched a message into a thin sheet of lead, and dropped it into the water.
The message wasn't a prayer of any grandeur. Somebody had taken their cloak from the bath-house. They wanted it back, they had a shortlist of suspects, and they were naming names.
The goddess didn't intervene. The cloak was never returned. But the tablet is still here, and we can still read it, which means that in the only sense that turned out to matter, the offering worked perfectly.
This piece is about why. It is also about a poem by a young poet from London that does the same thing, by the same method, in our own century.
The principle underneath both of them is short enough to put on a postcard. The water is indifferent. We never have been.
The spring that has never been asked its opinion
Bath is one of the strangest cities in Britain, because the thing at the centre of it isn't a building or a street plan. It is a hot spring, and the spring is far older than any of the human arrangements assembled around it.
The water that surfaces beneath the Pump Room fell as rain on the Mendip Hills. It filtered down through limestone and travelled, by the best current estimate, for something in the order of ten thousand years. It was pressed some three kilometres down into the earth's own heat, then worked its way back up through a fault line into the light.
It arrives at forty-six degrees Celsius, at a rate of well over a million litres a day. It has done so without interruption through the whole of recorded human history and a very long time before that.
It has never once altered its behaviour on anyone's account.
What people threw into it
Faced with something that ancient and that indifferent, human beings did the obvious thing. They talked to it.
The Romans built a temple there to Sulis Minerva, folding the local British goddess Sulis into their own imperial pantheon. Into the sacred spring they threw coins, jewellery and votive offerings. They also threw in curse tablets: thin sheets of lead and pewter, inscribed with messages to the goddess and dropped into the steaming water.
Around a hundred and thirty have been recovered. They aren't grand theological documents. They are almost unbearably ordinary.
They are complaints about stolen property. A cloak taken from the bath-house. A stolen bracelet. Six coins from a purse. They name suspects. They demand justice. They ask the goddess to punish whoever did it.
Real people, standing at the edge of that water, putting their small private grievances into permanent form and giving them to something they believed was listening.
The Georgians did the same thing seventeen centuries later, in a different material. They quarried honey-coloured oolitic limestone out of Lansdown, built those great tiered crescents, and cut the street names directly into the stone. It was an assumption of permanence, incised into rock. Beneath all of it the ground is clay, and the clay slips, slowly and inevitably, in Lyncombe Vale. The water rises through the fault regardless, and has never been asked for its opinion on any of it.
Bath
Rainfall on the Carboniferous ridges of the Mendips
filters deep—a ten-thousand-year detour
northward beneath the crushed seams of the Somerset coalfield.
Pressed three kilometres down into the earth's native heat,
it rises through the Pennyquick Fault at forty-six degrees.
It steams in the valley's morning chill,
already ancient when the first votive bronze slipped into the water.
Oolitic limestone, quarried from the dry heights of Lansdown,
is dressed and stacked in pale, tiered crescents.
Street names are incised directly into the masonry:
a Georgian assumption of permanence resting on a bed of clay,
weighed down by the slow, inevitable slips of Lyncombe Vale.
Above the Avon, the sheer green ridgeline of Beechen Cliff
stands as a sudden geological veto to the terraces’ southward push.
Black iron railings guard the vertical drop into the basements.
Beneath the Pump Room and the colonnaded antiquity,
beneath lead curse-tablets dropped to Sulis in the steaming dark,
this brief, two-thousand-year episode of stone
straddles the fracture. A million and a quarter litres
surge blindly upward every day, indifferent to the gods
we name them for, still bleeding ancient heat into the river-terrace silts.
From Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry, published 3rd September 2026.
Why the tablets survived
They are the surviving voices of ordinary Roman-British people. Not emperors, not generals, not poets. And they survive because they were specific, not because their authors were important.
They don't say somebody has wronged me. They say: my cloak was taken from the bath-house, and here are the names of the six people who might have done it.
That precision is the whole reason we can still hear them. A general complaint would have told us nothing and moved nobody. The stolen cloak reaches across two thousand years and lands.
How to Write About Grief: Where It Usually Fails
This is, I think, the single most useful craft lesson available to anyone writing about loss.
Grief writing fails almost always in the same way. It reaches for the general statement instead of the specific detail.
It says I miss him. It says he was a wonderful man. It says the pain is indescribable, and the moment a poem says the pain is indescribable it has stopped describing, and the reader is left holding nothing.
All of those sentences are true, and deeply felt, and almost entirely without power on the page, because the reader is being told about an emotion rather than given the thing that produces it.
The easy version of the elegy exists, and most of us have written it.
A young poet's answer
For most of my podcast's life, the guest poem has come from someone long dead: Wordsworth, Hardy, Coleridge, Clare. Voices settled into the canon, safely historical.
Not this time. Leila Lillian Dudmish is a young poet from London, and her poem Treasured You is an elegy for her grandfather. I want to treat it the way I would treat any poem I bring to you: as a piece of writing, doing work by technique, the way Hardy's poems do work and Clare's poems do work.
What struck me on first reading was its discipline.
This is a poem about the fear of forgetting someone, which is one of the hardest subjects to write about without collapsing into pure statement. Treasured You refuses to collapse. It reaches, again and again, for the small physical particular, and lets those particulars carry the whole weight.
Look at what it does.
It never once tells us her grandfather was loved. Instead it gives us a shirt. Specifically, his classic light blue shirt. That single adjective is doing an enormous amount of work. Classic isn't about the colour. It tells us the shirt was habitual: the one he always wore, the one the family would recognise at a distance, the one that meant him before his face was close enough to see. A whole texture of ordinary life is packed into one word, and the poem spends nothing to get it. That is economy of the kind poets spend decades learning.
It gives us a chuckle that has been unheard for a while. And notice that it is a chuckle, not a laugh. A smaller, more particular, more domestic sound.
It gives us the stories he repeated, which is a detail only somebody who actually sat through them could supply, and which carries a whole relationship in four words.
And it gives us a white t-shirt losing its scent, which I think is the most devastating image in the poem, because it is the one thing in the whole piece that is actively, measurably disappearing while she watches. You can't argue with a scent fading. You can't slow it down. It is loss happening in real time, in an object you can hold.
None of those details are grand. That is exactly why they work.
The detail nobody else could have supplied
This principle can be misread as an instruction to pile on description, and that produces a different kind of dead poem.
The test isn't how much detail. It is whether the detail is one only you could have supplied.
Anyone can say they loved their grandfather. Only somebody who actually knew him can tell you which shirt. The general statement asks your reader to feel something on your behalf; the specific detail simply produces the feeling, without asking. And the stranger and more particular the detail, the better it works, because specificity is what convinces a reader that the thing being described actually existed.
Grieve for what never happened
There is a second principle underneath the first, and Treasured You demonstrates it in its final stanza.
The poem spends four stanzas grieving for things that happened: the stories, the gestures, the shirt, the scent. Then it turns at the end and grieves instead for something that never happened at all. A night in Bournemouth. A trip her grandfather had always wished to make, didn't make, and now can't.
That is a difficult manoeuvre to bring off, and it is the reason the poem's last line lands the way it does. The regret isn't only for what has been lost. It is for what was never taken up in the first place, which is the sharper and less comfortable of the two griefs.
Grief for the unlived thing has a particular sting, because it can't be softened by memory. There is no memory of it to soften anything with.
So: if you are working on an elegy of your own and it feels somehow blunt, that is very often what is missing. The poem is full of what was, and empty of what was going to be. Go looking for the holiday never taken, the conversation never had, the thing they always said they would get round to. It is usually there, and it is usually the sharpest material in the drawer.
What the water has to say about all this
The harder thing is what the spring at Bath has to contribute.
It doesn't care. That isn't cynicism; it is simply what my poem is about. A million and a quarter litres come up through that fault every day, at the same temperature, entirely indifferent to the gods we named them for and to every private plea ever dropped into them.
The cloak was never returned. Sulis didn't intervene. The water wasn't listening, and it isn't listening now.
And yet the tablets are still here.
The goddess didn't receive them. They are here because somebody took the trouble to write them down, precisely, in a form that could outlast them. The offering didn't work in the way its authors intended. It worked in a way they couldn't have imagined. It survived. The specificity was the durable part.
That is what I would ask you to take away, whether you are writing about a person, a place, or something you are frightened of losing. The universe isn't going to help you hold on to it. The water will keep rising at forty-six degrees whatever you throw into it, and the ground beneath the crescents will keep slipping regardless of how confidently the street names were cut.
What you have, against all that indifference, is the ability to be exact. To name the shirt. To name the chuckle. To name the town he always meant to visit and never did.
That precision is the only technology we have ever had for making something last. As the tablets in that spring prove, it works far better and far longer than the people using it ever expect.
About the book
Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry is the fourth volume in British Counties In Verse. The paperback was published on Amazon on 3rd September 2026 and is available now. The Kindle edition is available to pre-order.
It runs a hundred miles, from the heights of Exmoor down to the drowning Levels: a twelve-metre tide that resets the coastline twice a day, rivers held above the fields they drain, a limestone gorge being quarried and walked to dust at the same time, a hill that refuses to be Avalon, an island of imported clay that has been sinking for two thousand years and is still legible, and a city built on top of water that has never once been listening.
Readers of the earlier volumes should know this one is harder-edged. There is less mortar of sentiment in it than in Cornwall, Cumbria or North Yorkshire. The language is treated more like masonry: the heavy, specific, correct names of things, laid one on top of another and left to hold their own weight. Everything above is, more or less, the argument for why.
The volumes so far
Cornwall In Verse — Tide To Tor In Poetry — available now
Cumbria In Verse — Lakes To Fells In Poetry — available now
North Yorkshire In Verse — Moor To Shore In Poetry — available now
Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry — paperback out now; Kindle on pre-order
Northumberland, coast to Cheviot — in progress, March 2027
Three things that genuinely help
There is no publisher's marketing budget behind this series. What it has instead is readers, which means three small things do real work.
Leave a review. This is the one that matters most right now. Two honest sentences in the first weeks after publication does more than anything I could pay for, because early reviews are what persuade Amazon to show a book to strangers. It doesn't need to be kind. Only honest.
Pre-order the Kindle, if an eBook suits you better than a paperback. Pre-orders land on release day in a single block, which counts for more than the same sales spread across a month.
Tell one person. Not a broadcast. One specific person: the friend who walks, the relation who lives down there, the colleague who once told you they used to read poetry and stopped. That single handover is how nearly every reader I have has arrived.
And if you aren't in a position to buy a book, put it entirely out of your mind. You are here, reading about a stolen cloak and a light blue shirt. That was always the point.
Suggest the next guest poem
If there is a poem you would like featured in a future episode — a classic, something modern, or a personal favourite you have carried with you for years — send it to me at aldencarrow78@gmail.com.
Every suggestion goes into a draw for a signed copy of Somerset In Verse, sent by hand. The next guest poem will come from one of you, and that is precisely how I want this to work: not a monument behind glass, but something living, passed hand to hand between people who still care to listen.
A stolen cloak, named precisely on a sheet of lead, two thousand years ago. A light blue shirt, named precisely, last year. Neither the goddess nor the water was ever listening. Both of them are still here.
The water is indifferent. We never have been. And it turns out that the caring, written down precisely enough, is the part that survives.
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