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| Snipe |
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| Firetail |
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| Nightingale |
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| Badger |
By the titles of the poems I honestly thought I would enjoy them more than I did but oh well. I read through them alright but having no commas or periods and only a few dashes made it particularly tiring to read. I didn't feel like he was rambling, just that he didn't know how to end a thought and figured the reader could do it for him.
Looking up the pictures of the birds gives a nice visual of what he's talking about because he doesn't really describe the animal's physical feature, just what
he's doing in the bird poems. If this is his idea of writing so readers can experience what he went through while looking at these birds and scrounging around in the woods infringing on their privacy then it's not really what I look for in writings about nature.
The Badger was my favorite of his poems that we were to read because it had so much energy and so much more vivaciousness. It was more of a telling of a tale then the whole
'I'm creeping around trying not to scare this bird so I can find its nest and tell you about it' thing.
Basically, I like Clare's word choice and the subject matter, but most of the way he tells the reader just doesn't work for me.
I enjoyed reading "The Badger" and it is my favorite too, but what do you think about the end? "Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again/Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies/And leaves his hold and cackles groans and dies." I wasn't expecting that ending!
ReplyDeleteI love the fact that you added pictures, especially the one of the badger.
ReplyDeleteI liked aspects of "The Badger" but I felt bad for him, especially toward the end. The lack of punctuation also led me to have difficulties zoning out during the reading.
ReplyDeleteyes, the ending is really stark--no disney ending here--why would Clare do this? In the poem, the badger takes whatever people give him (beatings, tauntings, sicking dogs on him) and he keeps on living. He's stubborn, resilient, and persistent--in the face of all odds, he just keeps giving it back at the world. And this is how he dies: he grins and drives the crowd back and finally "cackles" -- he laughs at them all as he is dying. Perhaps we can see this as Clare's allegory for the poet--beaten, dragged down by criticism, he just keeps on fighting and clawing and grinning until he dies--but he has never begged for mercy or given up the fight. This is what it meant to be the peasant poet in 1835.
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