“The Badger” is written in heroic couplets, or pairs of rhyming lines in iambic pentameter (five pairs of one unstressed and one stressed syllable). By the nineteenth century, it had become something of an old-fashioned style. More closely associated with seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century poets like Alexander Pope, it was a form only rarely employed by the Romantics. When they did, it was often used satirically, as in Robert Browning’s famous poem “My Last Duchess.”
Furthermore, Romantic poets who did use the form frequently employed “enjambment,” or ended the line at a word that is not the end of a phrase or sentence. For example, in the opening lines of “My Last Duchess,” Browning writes, “That’s my last duchess painted on the wall,/ Looking as if she were alive. I call/ That piece a wonder.” “Wall” and “call” rhyme with each other, but “call” is not the end of the phrase—it leads directly into “that piece a wonder” in the beginning of the next line.
Enjambment makes the poem “flow.” Although the rhyme creates a sense of conclusion at the end of the second line of each couplet, the reader has to quickly move forward to understand the meaning of the full sentence or phrase. We often experience enjambed lines as more dynamic and exciting to read. “The Badger” can feel programmatic and predictable in contrast.
So why would Clare use this form? We can think of a few reasons, and more than one can be true. First, Clare was a young poet when he wrote “The Badger,” and he still took extensive inspiration from others. Although he was certainly familiar with the more experimental Romantics, he also would have had a lot of respect for the older poets whose work he read in school. Indeed, his third book, The Shepherd’s Calendar, was explicitly a reworking of a collection of poems by the sixteenth-century poet Edmund Spenser. Clearly, he wasn’t too worried about seeming old-fashioned, and perhaps felt that more traditional forms could confer prestige on his work. Indeed, Clare would employ heroic couplets in many of his other poems.
However, we can also read “The Badger”’s use of heroic couplets as part of the poem’s meaning. The predictable, programmatic nature of Clare’s verse seems at odds with the drama and excitement of the events he is describing. However, although the badger-baiting takes on the drama of a battle, in reality it is a form of low-stakes, everyday cruelty. The systematic, measured progression from one couplet to the next implicitly emphasizes that all the excitement of the hunt is really a by-the-numbers progression of ordinary events.
