Living Wittily

The Nature Poet John Clare and the Reed Sparrow.

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Stood around yesterday trying to get a clear photo of the female reed bunting. Became hide and seek. The result is one of those images you can't plan for. Soft focus broom in the foreground, red dogwood, and a bird wondering about this weird human playing peek-a-boo through the bushes
 
P1000593Here are two other photos of the uncooperative reed buntings. Writing before ornithologists standardised bird identities, John Clare, my favourite nature poet often used either the local folk names or his own made-up names to identify birds. He called this bird the reed sparrow, and you can see why in some of the markings.
 
This 19th Century farm labourer has left us some of the most wonderfully observed descriptions of birds and their nests. Keats the Romantic poet complained of Clare the Naturalist's poet, "the description too much prevailed over the sentiment."
 
Here's one of his poems, about this most wonderful, curious, to be celebrated world and its natural environments. And with apologies to John Keats, there's plenty of sentiment in this poem!
 
 
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                     All Nature Has A Feeling
 
All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks
Are life eternal: and in silence they
Speak happiness beyond the reach of books;
There's nothing mortal in them; their decay
Is the green life of change; to pass away
And come again in blooms revivified.
Its birth was heaven, eternal it its stay,
And with the sun and moon shall still abide
Beneath their day and night and heaven wide.

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