{"id":2075,"date":"2012-07-13T13:34:19","date_gmt":"2012-07-13T12:34:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=2075"},"modified":"2012-07-13T13:34:19","modified_gmt":"2012-07-13T12:34:19","slug":"john-clare-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2012\/07\/13\/john-clare-day\/","title":{"rendered":"John Clare day"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Monday's Guardian, George Monbiot<\/a> suggested that today ought to be John Clare Day (his birth date in 1793). \u00a0Well, fine by me, and I'd join any queue to be the first to agree with this. \u00a0Monbiot's argument is that\u00a0John Clare was the poet of the environmental crisis \u2013 200 years ago \u2013 who showed how the era of greed began with the enclosure of the land.<\/p>\n

I read Clare because of his understanding of the natural world and human interaction with it, and because his poetry describes a past world whose echoes you can still feel all around you \u2013 if you look \u2013 \u00a0despite enclosures, loss of species (and rural jobs), neo-liberalism (and other evils).<\/p>\n

This is JC's\u00a0Emmonsails Heath in Winter<\/a> <\/em>where a bumbarrel is a long-tailed tit.<\/em><\/p>\n

I love to see the old heath\u2019s withered brake<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling,<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While the old heron from the lonely lake<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Starts slow and flaps his melancholy wing,<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And oddling crow in idle motions swing<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the half rotten ash tree\u2019s topmost twig,<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Beside whose trunk the gipsy makes his bed.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread,<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The fieldfares chatter in the whistling thorn<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And for the awe round fields and closen rove,<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And hang on little twigs and start again.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Monday's Guardian, George Monbiot suggested that today ought to be John Clare Day (his birth date in 1793). \u00a0Well, fine by me, and I'd join any queue to be the first to agree with this. \u00a0Monbiot's argument is that\u00a0John...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2075\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}