I’ve never actually laid eyes on a badger but I feel as though I know this stealthy cousin of the weasel better than my neighbor’s dog. This is because a long time ago I came upon John Clare’s poem “Badger” in an anthology and read and reread it so often that I learned it by heart. Clare was a great describer, one of the greatest in English literature. He depicted animals and birds of all sorts – he even wrote a sequence on birds’ nests – and he had a marvelous eye for English landscapes, for fens and marshes and forests. He wrote delicate poems on the seasons and the subtle mutations of nature, which he regarded as a loving but erratic companion whose flitting moods he was uniquely suited to interpret. In receptivity he was akin to Keats, his contemporary, who befriended him, except that Clare’s empathy with nature appears almost promiscuous by comparison. He spent the last 20 years of his life in a madhouse, and it is tempting, though no doubt overly romantic, to speculate that his extravagant gift for identification tipped him over reason’s brink.

The protean suppleness of his imagination is such that he seems able to enter the most secret impulses of the raven and the fern owl, the field cricket and the “lady fly.” Clare’s fantastic eye as well as his felicity of phrase first charmed me but over the years his “Badger” has become important to me for another reason. It is the ultimate poem of courage without hope, a small epic for the cornered. Though he takes a lowly badger as his hero, the poem applies to all, humans as well as beasts, who are outnumbered, tormented, and shown no mercy, but who through sheer indomitable cussedness stand fast to the end.

Clare’s badger “with shaggy hide and sharp nose scrowed with black,” is elemental in his energy (“scrowed” is a dialect word for “marked and lined”). Clare first presents him as a shambling and rather bumbling grubber among roots and ferns. But when he is baited, he becomes heroic. “When midnight comes a host of dogs and men / Go out and track the badger to his den.” For the men, it is sport; for the badger, it is life and death. The terror, and the magnificence, of the poem arise from Clare’s cool depiction of lonely courage pitted against human cruelty. His technique, though 19th century in form, is cinematic in effect. The shock of the hunt ripples out to alarm others:

The old fox hears the noise and drops the goose
The poacher shoots and hurries from the cry
And the old hare half wounded buzzes by

Clare describes how the men pin the badger down with a forked stick and bring him back to town where all day long they bait him, setting their dogs upon him and pounding him with rocks and sticks when he tries to escape. At last

He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men
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.

Clare himself knew what it was to be badgered. Self-taught, a rough bumpkin thrust into the parlors of Wordsworth and Byron, Keats and Shelley, he found momentary celebrity as a rustic bard. He often employed dialect in his verses, which gave them a quaint rural lilt in the ears of the gentry, who lionized him briefly with a mix of admiration and condescension. He was immensely prolific; according to some estimates, he wrote more than 3,000 poems, though it’s hard to say, since his complete works have not yet been fully edited. Afflicted by amnesia and delusions, he was committed in 1841 to the Northhampton Asylum. He kept on writing, sometimes incoherently, more often with frightening lucidity.

Clare has recently been the subject of a fine biography by Jonathan Bate (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,672 pages,$40.) but for me his unmistakable voice comes through most poignantly in the compilation entitled “John Clare by Himself,” edited by Eric Robinson and David Powell (Routledge, 364 pages; $18.95) in the beautiful Fyfield Books series of paperbacks. Here Clare’s fragments of autobiography, journal notes, letters, and various jottings show the man in all his innocence, rapture, and final wretchedness. Thus, he wrote in a letter from the madhouse, “I have not written to you a long while but here I am in the Land of Sodom where all the peoples’ brains are turned the wrong way,” and he goes on to say of his confinement, “It is the purgatorial hell and French Bastile of English liberty.” But when he turned to poetry, he could write of his plight with the same plangent objectivity he brought to the wren or the groundlark:

I am – yet what I am, none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:-
I am the self-consumer of my woes;-
They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes:-
And yet I am, and live – like vapors tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my lifes esteems;
Even the dearest, that I love the best
Are strange – nay, rather stranger than the rest.

In an early fragment, Clare noted that he was visited almost against his will by poetic promptings. He would hide in the fields where he toiled to scribble them down on whatever scrap came to hand. He seems to have been helpless against his own inspiration. At the end the world of nature, with which he had been so intimate, itself turned unrecognizable. I think though that John Clare remained at heart that stubborn badger of his, a rooter after words, earth-drenched, and even in his final incoherence still fighting to find the language with which to make some sense of the horror that had cornered him.