Summary
“The Badger” recounts a day of badger-baiting, from when the town captures the badger to its eventual death. In the beginning, a group of men go out with their dogs at midnight to catch the badger. They place a bag over its hole, so that when the badger emerges, he is captured inside it. Once he’s caught, they let loose their strongest dogs. Immediately, both the humans and non-humans in their surroundings respond to the familiar sound of the barking hounds. The old fox, who knows the dogs from previous hunts, panics and drops his goose. A poacher realizes there are people nearby and hurries to shoot his target so he can run away after getting it. He fails to aim properly, and the hare he was attempting to poach hurries past, wounded but not dead.
Meanwhile, the men use a forked stick to force the badger to the town, where all day their dogs bite and claw at him. The laughter and shouting of the men scare the town’s population of pigs, while the badger gets more and more aggressive, running through the streets and biting at the people he encounters. The people make an uproar in response, and the badger pushes them back almost to their doorways. They respond by throwing stones at him, and by urging the dogs to return to the fight.
Although the badger is barely half the size of his opponents, he beats them off for hours. An enormous mastiff gives up, and even a fierce bulldog begins to become afraid. The badger loses none of his viciousness, and continues to relish the fight, pursuing the crowd and biting at their heels. A drunkard staggers and swears, attempting to avoid him, while frightened women take their sons inside. Yet the badger just laughs and lunges at the crowd, trying to make his way back to the woods. The crowd beats him back with sticks and bats, and so he turns once more to fight the dogs. They release all the hounds at once, and the boys and men join in the fight, kicking at him, until he falls down as though dead. Once more he rises up to lunge at the crowd, until finally, “kicked and torn and beaten out,” he lies down and dies.
Analysis
“The Badger” is a particularly brutal poem with a difficult-to-determine stance towards animal cruelty. Scholars familiar with Clare’s work and his typically sympathetic attitude towards animals have often read the poem as celebrating the badger and condemning the cruelty of the crowd. Yet others have pointed out that the poem, although centered on the badger, does not seem to condemn the practice of badger baiting. We’ll talk through aspects of the poem that support both sides of this argument, but ultimately it’s up to the reader to decide where Clare stands.
Generally, each line of “The Badger” ends at the end of a phrase or sentence. However, in line 3, he writes, “And put a sack within the hole, and lie/ Till the old grunting badger passes by.” “Hole” is the end of the phrase, yet Clare continues for another two words, ending on “lie” instead. By isolating “lie” on its own, Clare draws out the moment where the hunters wait for their prey, as the break between the two lines causes the reader to pause just as the hunters do. However, isolating the word “lie” on its own also draws out the word’s other denotation, and thus emphasizes that the men employ dishonesty as well as patience to capture the badger.
If we see the men as employing trickery to force the badger from his lair, the whole conflict looks a little less noble. There are a few other aspects of the first stanza that make us think Clare has at least mixed feelings about the practice of badger baiting. When the men release the hounds, the whole landscape responds to the familiar sound—the fox startles, while a poacher fires off a panicked shot and ends up maiming a hare. We get a sense of a world fundamentally marked by human cruelty; the fox, who knows and fears the sound of dogs even when they do not pursue him, is a particularly moving suggestion of shared trauma among the animal kingdom.
Later in the poem, Clare writes that the men “laugh and shout and fright the scampering hogs.” Again, he emphasizes negative human impact on the animal world. Clare doesn’t write the poem from the perspective of the men, who are simply enjoying a raucous day of fun, but from a more distant perspective that enables him to see both what the men do and how it impacts their surroundings. As in Clare’s many poems that more directly mimic the perspective of animals, here he readily extends his empathy beyond the human sphere. Critics might call this a rejection of “anthropocentrism,” or an attitude that centers human experience above anything else.
From the first stanza, Clare characterizes the badger as an individual, while only discussing the men as a group. In line 4, he describes the badger as “old” and “grunting.” Although these adjectives aren’t particularly flattering, they do make it easier for us to imagine the badger. Rather than an abstraction, we picture a particular animal, and imagine what he looks like and how he sounds. At the end of the stanza, Clare writes, “he runs along and bites at all he meets.” Again, the description is generally negative, but it does provide a sense of the badger’s personality: we see him as vicious, feisty, and more than willing to fight back.
Indeed, as the poem progresses, the badger seems more and more like the hero of an epic story. The second stanza emphasizes his status as an underdog. Although the dogs are almost twice his size, the badger fights with them “for hours and beats them all.” Think of the story of David and Goliath—we tend to feel sympathy for a smaller competitor who is nevertheless able to defeat his opponent.
There’s something thrilling about the image of the little badger delighting in a fight where he is at such a physical disadvantage, “The heavy mastiff, savage in the fray / Lies down and licks his feet and turns away. / The bulldog knows his match and waxes cold, / The badger grins and never leaves his hold.” Each of these lines employs the same sentence structure, beginning with an animal and then describing its actions. The parallel structure emphasizes the difference between the mastiff and the bulldog, who both give up, and the badger, who continues to delight in the fight.
The phrase “never leaves his hold” is a bit puzzling. In this context, hold usually means den or lair. However, the badger has been lured from his hole at the beginning of the poem, and is now out in the open, following the crowd and fighting the dogs. From these descriptions, we can determine that "hold" means something more symbolic: the badger’s “hold” is his courage and his ferocity. The dogs abandon these protective attributes, but the badger continues to dwell within them.
In the final stanza, Clare again uses the word “hold” in this symbolic context to play up the badger’s heroism. The final two lines depict the badger’s defeat: “Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies / And leaves his hold and crackles, groans, and dies.” Clare takes care to emphasize that the badger, unlike the dogs, never gives up. He is merely beaten until he is no longer physically capable of continuing to fight. Here, the use of the word “hold” to symbolize the badger’s courage and viciousness emphasizes how central these attributes were to his sense of self. Forced by injury to cease fighting, the badger necessarily loses the courage and ferocity that sustained him in the previous stanza. For the badger, to leave the hold of his will to fight is to die; his existence was inextricable from his ferocity.
The badger’s defeat might remind us of the death of a hero in epic poetry, like the death of Hector in Homer’s Iliad. In elevating the badger to the status of a hero, Clare can be seen as challenging the logic of badger-baiting, which perceives the badger as merely something to toy with for human amusement. However, by describing the badger’s death as noble, Clare may also afford some of that nobility to the practice of badger-baiting as a whole. The sport appears as an opportunity to bring out what makes the badger so special: its courage, ferocity, and persistence.
Furthermore, although Clare’s choice to avoid describing individual humans makes it impossible to see them as heroes, it also prevents us from really viewing them as villains. If they delighted in the badger’s death, we might see them as bloodthirsty or cruel. Instead, the badger-baiting merely follows a familiar script. Even in the first line, we don’t see the men decide to begin the hunt; rather, they seem to respond naturally to midnight’s arrival, as though their actions were predetermined. The rest of the hunt precedes in the same way, all the way until the badger’s death. Clare is responding to badger-baiting’s status as a tradition, something that would have happened over and over throughout his childhood. Although he celebrates the badger’s role, and even suggests that the badger’s heroism is far greater than that of his human opponents and their dogs, Clare still seems to characterize the practice as a natural part of country life, no different from a hawk hunting a deer.
