Cut grass

Hay has inspired a great many poems which is not as surprising as  might now appear:  it is summer's abundance turned to winter's fodder without which little could once survive.
John Clare wrote several poems on the subject but The Mouse's Nest, written in 1835,  is the one I find most captivating.

I found a ball of grass among the hay
And progged it as I passed and went away;
And when I looked I fancied something stirred,
And turned again and hoped to catch the bird —
When out an old mouse bolted in the wheats
With all her young ones hanging at her teats;
She looked so odd and so grotesque to me,
I ran and wondered what the thing could be,
And pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood;
Then the mouse hurried from the craking brood.
The young ones squeaked, and as I went away
She found her nest again among the hay.
The water o'er the pebbles scarce could run
And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun. 

The mutual shock/surprise of man and mouse is instantly arresting, then there is the relief that she finds her brood again (will they survive?) and finally the odd image of the glittering cesspools  reminds us of the reality of agricultural life in the 19th century.

However, this response to the poem by American poet Reginald Gibbons has provided me with a more profound understanding of The Mouse's Nest in terms of the economic upheaval of the time and its consequences for the rural population, not least Clare himself.

'Reading Clare’s poem, which was written amidst the drastic social change and suffering caused by the private appropriation of public lands and the resulting displacement and impoverishment of poor laborers, I cannot help feeling that in the utter otherness of the mouse, he saw himself. Like the mouse, he had many children to support by his physical labor, since he could not do so by his verses. And perhaps he felt he himself was considered “odd and grotesque.” Certainly he was pained in his awareness of being different from those among whom he lived–Clare was unlike other farm labourers in being a poet, and in being a farm laborer, he was very unlike other poets. Of all the little things he sees while meandering through the field in a thoughtful mood, it is the peculiar overburdened mouse which in some way he in particular is predisposed to notice.