Wednesday, February 25, 2015
The Badger
John Clare's poem The Badger depicts the cruelty that man is prone to in such sport as the hunt. In line 20 Clare mentions, "The old fox" nodding to the point at which hunting became much more about the difficulty of the hunt itself than about the prize. The Badger is better game than the fox because of its innate ferocity. It is not objectified for its physical embodiment, nor its wile, but the wild force that drives it. The Badger embodies evil (or perhaps force) in nature, while the men and dogs who capture, torture, and kill the poor badger represent the evil in our society of men.
The Badger's willingness to fight anything and everything with the same tenacity speaks to a state of nature in which the badger is on the defense from everything, "When badgers fight & every ones a foe" (line 32). The nature of the badger is reflective of the men who seek to destroy it. They see themselves in the badger, and their own visage is too much for them to bear. The woman "takes the boys away" (line 43), to spare them from seeing the badger's violent end.
I thought this poem was fairly straightforward, but some questions to consider:
Why does the badger grin?
Do we find him sympathetic because he's outnumbered, or because of some "me against the world" experience that we can relate to?
-Xenophanes
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I think you are right to qualify the assessment of the Badger as evil in this poem—I agree that Clare focuses more on its “force” than on any inherently bad quality it might possess. As the first stanza suggests, the badger is a victim of circumstance: because the huntsman falls in his hole, the badger is captured, dragged into town, and baited. He is absolutely on the defensive, but only because he has been forced to be; this is not the badger’s “natural” condition as the reader encounters in in the first stanza, where it is running on “his” woodland track, rooting around in the bushes, make dens in fens, and moving at an “awkward pace” (1-5). When brought to town, the badger becomes tenacious in the fight, and this is the central element of his force—but he is not doing this willingly (notice that he tries to escape to the woods in the middle of the poem but is beaten back into town). He is thus not initially a mirror of the men he fights, but he becomes one as the poem progresses. Thus, we might read the poem as a country v. city narrative: in the country, nature and peace, in the city, fighting and death. But there is more to it: Clare makes sure we understand that people deform nature, making it beat and drive and “grin” (which, if you are a badger, is a sign of fear and a defense mechanism, not a happy face)—characteristics of people that the badger should not have. When the other animals have given over the fight (the dogs refuse to fight anymore), people continue it. This turns the badger into a mirror of people’s inhumanity. It may also be a commentary on the dangers of personification: what do we see about ourselves when we give beings in nature our characteristics? Nothing good, Clare suggests.
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