A Spelling Tongue Twister of Sorts

While packing up my stuff to move it to our-next-year-house (ohmygosh, wedding is less than three weeks away now!), I came across a newspaper clipping my grandfather gave me. It says "author unknown", but it's possible one could find the author by Googling (or at least follow a trail of references...). There are plenty of similar poems out there. I think they're all quite clever :-)

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Ah, the perils of the English language! Reader Eric Hodgson sends in this piece titled "Spelling Traps" (author unknown). Speaking English is as complicated and hazardous as negotiating Durban traffic.

I take it you already know of tough and bough and cough and dough.
Others may stumble, but not you,
on hiccough, thorough, slough and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps, to learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word that looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead - it's said like bed, not bead; for goodness sake don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat. (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.)
A moth is not a moth in mother; nor both in bother, nor broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there, nor dear and fear for bear and pear.
And then there's dose and rose and lose -
just look them up - and goose and choose.
And cork and work and card and ward,
and font and front and word and sword.
And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Why man alive,
I learned to talk it when I was five.