Badger by John Clare

First published: 1920, in John Clare: Poems Chiefly from Manuscript

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“Badger” is written in heroic couplets, its sixty-eight lines divided into five sonnet-length stanzas. Since the copy-text of “Badger” is untitled, some editors have chosen to call it “Badger” and others “[The Badger]”; it has been anthologized in both five-and three-stanza versions. The following description of the poem refers to the five-stanza “Badger.”

The first stanza of the poem gives the reader a general sense of the badger’s appearance and activities. An awkward and unattractive animal, the badger does not live in harmony with humans and domestic animals: “The shepherds dog will run him to his den/ Followed and hooted by the dogs and men.” When the woodman goes hunting for foxes, he does not see the badger’s many holes and often tumbles into them.

In the second stanza, the men and their dogs trap the badger and bring him to town to be baited. The noise of the hunt frightens an old fox and a poacher, who misfires, wounding a hare. Although the badger is reputed to be an aggressive animal, much of the violence in the poem seems to come from men, who take a sadistic delight in tormenting the beast.

The badger fights heroically in the third stanza, turning on the crowds and the packs of dogs, beating them all, even the “heavy mastiff savage in the fray” and the bulldog. Despite being relatively diminutive in size, the badger fights for hours against impossible odds, and John Clare describes the beast as grinning throughout the battle. In contrast, the only human mentioned in this stanza is a drunkard who “swears and reels.”

The contrast between the valiant badger and the ignoble townspeople is further developed in the fourth stanza, where the badger is finally “kicked and torn and beaten out.” His attackers are larger and more numerous; they use sticks and clubs and kick the badger when he is down. The badger plays dead and then, grinning, chases the crowd away, but at last he “leaves his hold and cackles groans and dies.” The poem emphasizes the badger’s courage and the cowardly bullying of the village mob—although the badger dies, one might say that he wins a moral victory.

Some versions of the poem end with the fourth stanza, which certainly provides the poem with a climax, but Clare wrote a final, concluding stanza, describing a tame badger. This section of the poem presents the badger in another light—rather than a wild animal struggling for survival, the domesticated badger fights dogs when so commanded by his master, but it also “licks the patting hand and trys to play.” The last lines of the poem describe the tame badger’s essential timidity, as he “runs away from noise in hollow trees[s]/ Burnt by the boys to get a swarm of bees.” Given the chance, the badger seems capable of living with people in an affectionate and harmonious manner.

Forms and Devices

Clare’s poems are often loose in structure, catalogs of observations about nature that begin and end arbitrarily. Thus some of Clare’s editors have felt free to drop the last stanza of “Badger,” which seems to take away from the dramatic power of the three middle stanzas. “Badger” is unpunctuated, and this lack of punctuation makes it a fast-paced poem to read, with scarcely a stop (except for the line breaks) for the reader to take a breath. The fact that most lines are end-stopped allows Clare to dispense with punctuation, but he is not able to indicate midline pauses. This lack of punctuation gives the poem a spontaneous quality, as if it were being recited by the poet as he made it up, without much regard to grammar or organization. Unfortunately, many editors have chosen to punctuate Clare’s poems for him, and the editorially corrected poems seem less natural and more “literary” than the originals.

“Badger” contains relatively few dialect-words, and thus readers do not need to consult glossaries as much with this poem as they would with many of Clare’s other works. Some of the local terms Clare uses in “Badger” are “scrowed” (marked), “clapt the dogs” (set the dogs on), “dimute” (diminished), and “lapt” (wrapped or folded). Although Charles Lamb discouraged Clare from writing in dialect, Clare used Northamptonshire words and phrases in much of his verse. A word such as “scrowed” gives his poetry a regional flavor and distinguishes his verse from the more formally correct writings of his Romantic contemporaries.

In “Badger,” Clare piles up verbs in order to show the chaotic violence of the badger’s baiting through the streets of the town. In stanzas 3 and 4 the verb “drives” is used six times, as the badger aggressively drives away the sheeplike mob of people and dogs. One gets a sense of the power of the diminutive badger and the mindless cowardice of his tormentors. The violence of the badger-biting section of the poem reaches a crescendo in stanza 4, with the piling on of the verbs “drives,” “beats,” “falls,” “kicked,” “torn,” and “dies.” The badger, grinning and cackling to the end, is nevertheless the victim of a terrific display of communal violence—the animal is not simply killed, it is beaten to the point of dismemberment. The last stanza, although not without its share of violent verbs, seems almost idyllic in comparison with stanzas 2 through 4, and it ends with the image of a timid, tame badger running away from a noise.

In general, the language of the poem is concrete and unsentimental—some would even say harsh. Clare avoids the literary diction of other poets—he once criticized John Keats for using classical imagery in verse dealing with nature—and renders his descriptions of rural life as realistically as possible. Rather than philosophizing or examining his emotional reactions, Clare describes how the badger is killed in a noncommittal way and allows the reader to come to his or her own conclusions.