“The Badger” is a poem by the English Romantic poet John Clare. It describes the traditional sport of “badger baiting,” in which a badger is captured and made to fight with dogs until it dies. The poem was published in 1820, as part of Clare’s popular first collection, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. The book featured depictions of traditional English country life, including many practices that were in the process of disappearing. Badger baiting was one such practice; in 1835, it was banned as animal cruelty.
Clare is well known as a nature poet. Nearly all of his poems reference the countryside and the natural world. More unusually, he’s famous for poems written from the perspective of non-human creatures. For example, “Clock-a-Clay” imagines the world seen from the perspective of a ladybug. These poems have made him popular among modern-day environmentalists.
“The Badger” somewhat complicates our image of Clare as an early environmentalist. The poem’s attitude towards the practice of badger baiting is ambiguous. Clare centers the experience of the badger above that of his human torturers, and positions him as the hero of the poem. Yet in imagining the badger as a noble warrior rather than a victim of a cruel game, Clare lends the practice of badger baiting gravitas. Clare’s extraordinary empathy towards non-human animals lends excitement to his depiction of the scene, rather than leading him to write a polemical poem explicitly condemning the hunt.
