We have a new addition to our family, defined as the various denizens who live in and around our house. In the wee pond at the foot fo the garden we now have a resident frog. Andrew who is the acquaculture expert around here dug a small 18 inch hole, planted it with water plants and marsh plants and created a mini-ecosystem which our frog clearly approves.
My favourite nature poet, John Clare, had a sensitive and compassionate understanding of creaturely life. His poetry reveals his intimate knowledge and alert experience of nature around him. His bird poems are amongst the best in our language. His poem Summer Evening, which I've quoted below, shows just how observant, sympathetic and "green" Clare was, a couple of centuries before any of us caught up with his way of looking at the world around us. More than most he saw human activity as despoiling, threatening and wasteful of nature's gifts, and understood human behaviour to be more about replenishing the earth rather than dominating it. Sure he recognised that nature has its cruelties and necessities; but these are natural in a way that human activity is not; manufacturing on an industrial scale, a free for all for the earth's resources of land, minerals, forests and wood, fossil fuels, tolerance of polluted oceans, and addiction to processes that accelerate climate change. Human greed is one of the original sins and is the primary ingredient in the setting agent that enables us to build structural sins into the machinery and plant of the human economy. The last two lines of Clare's poem capture exactly the inward groan of a looted creation awaiting its redemption.
John Clare didn't live to see the full impact of the Industrial Revolution. But for his illness he might have been a David Attenborough though, or at least a presenter on Countryfile. In any case, he would have smiled and nodded appreciatively at Andrew's handiwork, and the provision of a purpose built home for our frog.
Summer Evening
The frog half fearful jumps across the path,
And little mouse that leaves its hole at eve
Nimbles with timid dread beneath the swath;
My rustling steps awhile their joys deceive,
Till past, and then the cricket sings more strong,
And grasshoppers in merry moods still wear
The short night weary with their fretting song.
Up from behind the molehill jumps the hare,
Cheat of his chosen bed, and from the bank
The yellowhammer flutters in short fears
From off its nest hid in the grasses rank,
And drops again when no more noise it hears.
Thus nature's human link and endless thrall,
Proud man, still seems the enemy of all.
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