Hello and welcome back to the Daily Palm here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by an English poet named John Clare.

He lived from 1793 to 1864 and is known as one of the best rural... He was the son of a farmer and became known for his, uh, his poems about

English countryside, English farm life and, uh, his sorrow at its destruction in the 19th century.

Wikipedia tells us that his biographer Jonathan Bate called him, quote,

the greatest laboring class poet that England has ever produced,

no one has ever written more powerfully of nature of a rural childhood

and of the alienated and unstable self, end quote.

I'm going to read from a poem called Badger today,

and I'm going to do that because, as I've been doing all week,

I'm going to, well, I opened at random from Harold Bloom's anthology, the best poems with the English language, and this is the poem that I opened to.

So I'll read it, offer a few comments with an assist from Harold Bloom, and then read it one more time.

So here is three stanzas from Badger.

When Midnight comes a host of dogs and men go out and track the badger to his den and put a sack

within the hole and lie till the old grunting badger passes by. He comes and hears. They let the strongest

loose. The old fox hears the noise and drops the goose. Posure shoots and hurries from the cry,

and the old hair half-wounded buzzes by. They get a fork stick to bear him down and drops the goose. Posure shoots and hurries from the cry, and the old hair half-wounded

buzzes by. They get a fork stick to bear him down, and clap the dogs and bear him to the town,

and bait him all the day with many dogs, and laugh and shout and fright the scampering hogs.

He runs along and bites at all he meets. They shout and hollow down the noisy streets.

He turns about to face the loud uproar

...