Pine Martens cover image Whittet Books
Marten
Originally untitled; NOES editors title
Marten
The martin cat long shaged of courage good
Of weazle shape a dweller in the wood
With badger hair long shagged and darting eyes
And lower then the common cat in size
Small head and running on the stoop
Snuffing the ground and hind parts shouldered up
He keeps one track and hides in lonely shade
Where print of human foot is scarcely made
Save when the woods are cut the beaten track
The woodmans dog will snuff cock tailed and black
Red legged and spotted over either eye
Snuffs barks and scrats the lice and passes bye
The great brown horned owl looks down below
And sees the shaggy martin come and go
The martin hurrys through the woodland gaps
And poachers shoot and make his skin for caps
When any woodman come and pass the place
He looks at dogs and scarcely mends his pace
And gipseys often and birdnesting boys
Look in the hole and hear a hissing noise
They climb the tree such noise they never heard
And think the great owl is a foreign bird
When the grey owl her young ones cloathed in down
Seizes the boldest boy and drives him down
They try agen and pelt to start the fray
The grey owl comes and drives them all away
And leaves the Martin twisting round his den
Left free from boys and dogs and noise and men
John Clare
Punctuation and spelling as from JC mss, text from
‘Clare’, NOES, Ed’s: Robinson & Summerfield, published OUP.
If available now, a good collection to have: includes some of Clare’s natural history writing
This poem attracted my attention because of the recent title from Whittet Books but also that it had mention of an owl in ‘reality’, which I was in search of for an earlier page on ‘owls’ poems. I am glad to have found something by Clare.
I reckon the owl mentioned is the one known now as Eurasian eagle owl from Clare’s note of colour and nesting. Not the white, Arctic Owl, or maybe there was another variety that is now extinct.
(Pine)Martens are extremely secretive animals and now very scarce in most of England. From this poem we can again see Clare’s quality of observation, including boys and hunters’ proclivities of the day. Clare was not averse to egg-collecting in his youth, ( note in poem the boy climbing the tree is chased away by the owl). I doubt he was actively a poacher or into badger hunting and the like but as always was an observer of detail of all around him, including the activities of people. His poem of ‘Badger’ being cornered by dogs and men can be read as straightforward, vivid, descriptive fact but potentially as anti-hunting though he may not have been able to declare it openly. It might well have been ‘cruelty’ that concerned him more.
tagged as: animals
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