What struck me most about John Clare's poem, "The Badger," was its sound. However, instead of paying attention to the rhyme and meter, I was drawn to the actual narrative noises in the poem. Because the rhyme scheme is a very standard AABB scheme, I fell into a very natural rhythm while I read it. I wasn't distracted trying to figure out how to say each verse (like I am with Burns's poetry), so I could focus on what was actually happening in the poem. In this sense, "The Badger" almost reminded me of Hemans' "Casabianca" or other poems of the sort.
These narrative-type poems set themselves apart from much of the Romantic poetry we've read. A lot of the poems in this course tend to vacillate between effusive, stream-of-consciousness style verse (which the poets oftentimes illustrate with complex meter, rhyme, and diction) and narrative lyric. Even some of the active lyric portions of the poems, though, can be confusing. At its most complex, Romantic poetry is a hodge-podge of form and content intricately woven into verse.
"The Badger" is one example of Romantic poetry that abstains from this tendency. We must ask, then, how is it romantic? I think that the poem is romantic in two essential ways. Firstly, it says something grand: it comments on the violence of men toward the animal world and asks us to question what we think we know about perpetrators and victims. Here is a badger--a supposedly awkward, aggressive, unattractive animal--fighting for his life and being beaten to submission by a group of cackling men with nothing better to do. What does this say about mankind?
Secondly, the poem is romantic because it draws the reader into a live-action journey, where everything is chaotic, loud, and rushed. The repetition of sounds throughout the poem does this the most. The badger "grunts," "cries," "cackles," and "groans." The men "hoot," "break," "tumble," "clap," "laugh shout and fright," "shout," "hollo," "uproar" "swear and reel," and "urge." Even the wounded hare and the swarm of bees (who are minor characters in the poem) buzz and make a commotion. Reading the poem, then, is an experience in itself. It is not merely a flash of pretty images and metaphors, but a full live-action journey.
I also felt the intensity of the sounds in the poem. I think of Clare's poetry as replicating an experience rather than commenting on that experience. In that way, he has less of an identity as a poet but at the same time he has such a gift for allowing the reader into the world of nature.
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