Courage
The badger’s courage is probably the most important theme of “The Badger.” Clare emphasizes that the badger is at an impossible physical disadvantage. He is outnumbered by men and dogs, and much smaller than his opponents. When he actually tries to escape and get back to his lair, he has no hope of outmaneuvering the crowd who beat him back and “quickly” stop him in his tracks. Yet despite having no hope of winning, the badger comes off as noble because he never fears his many opponents, and even seems to delight in fighting them. At the end of the second stanza, Clare describes the badger as grinning, and similarly, at the beginning of the third stanza, he writes that the badger “laughs” before hurrying into the crowd to bite at their heels. Both verbs have human connotations, encouraging us to see the badger’s success in the fight as akin to that of a great warrior who delights in battle, rather than simply the behavior of a beast whose natural tendency is to fight. Clare’s representation of the badger’s courage neatly encapsulates the poem’s complicated attitude towards the practice of badger baiting. On one hand, his courage makes the badger the hero of the poem, and encourages the reader to sympathize with him over the humans who torment him. Yet it also obscures the reality that the badger has been forced to fight against his will. We get involved in the battle, and forget that for the humans it is merely a game.
Violence
“The Badger” is remarkably violent. The pace of the poem is frenetic, moving rapidly from one instance of physical violence to the next. Just in the first stanza, we see a fox who has killed a goose, interrupted by the sound of dogs trained to fight. In the next line, a poacher appears wielding a gun and pursuing a wounded hare. Then Clare’s attention shifts to the badger-baiting itself, where the badger is physically forced to the town and attacked by the dogs, while the men “laugh and shout and fright the scampering hogs” and the badger “runs along and bites at all he meets.” The density of verbs creates a sense of chaos. Everyone is acting at once, and the fight becomes a blur of motion and bloodshed.
Indeed, in the next stanza, Clare writes “when badgers fight, then everyone’s a foe.” The line emphasizes that in the badger fight, the violence cannot be reduced to a single conflict between the badger and an opponent. Instead, violence overtakes the scene, with every member of the community drawn into the badger’s aggression. By portraying violence as an overarching atmosphere, rather than lingering with a few particular actions, Clare downplays the cruelty of badger-baiting.
Country Tradition
One of Clare’s central concerns, especially in his early poetry, was country sport and traditional activities. “The Badger” describes a day of badger-baiting, a traditional sport in which a badger is captured and made to fight with dogs until it dies. The practice might seem brutal and bizarre to us, but Clare portrays it from an unemotional distance. Although his sympathies seem to lie more with the badger than the men, he doesn’t characterize the human participants as either courageous or villainous. Not everyone in the nineteenth century viewed badger baiting as unobjectionable. In 1835, only 15 years after Clare wrote this poem, it was banned as a form of animal cruelty.
The eighteenth century was also a period of early industrialization. Many people began leaving country towns to work in the city, and farmland was increasingly divided up and sold, destroying traditional ways of life. Badger baiting as Clare portrays it relies on a strong community: the people all implicitly trust each other, and work together to capture the badger, protect their children, and prevent him from escaping back to the forest. It’s telling that the drunkard and the poacher are the only characters in the poem who act as individuals—both are outcasts who have violated social expectations. By writing about country tradition and community as natural and inevitable, Clare resists his own times, in which rural life was rapidly changing and many traditional practices were fading into the past.
