suggests resources for the emergence of 'a different kind of freedom', from this modern, urban conception - in interpersonal relationships, and similarly in the relationship between people and their environment.

Clare's early poetry consists of the poet writing himself into his surroundings. He is 'The Badger'; he becomes Swordy Well. Tom Paulin has highlighted the parallel between Clare and 'The Badger': both are vulnerable, simple animals unable to survive in a violent modern world. The poem uses a language of rawness and exposure: "Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies / And leaves his hold and cackles groans and dies". This poem marks the beginning of Clare's defeatism which reaches its lowest point in the 'Whasp' sonnets written during his incarceration at Northampton Asylum.

'The Lament of Swordy Well" is the finest example of Clare's early poetry and takes his verse to its natural conclusion by employing an unusual conceit: Clare becomes the place about which he is writing. In the nature poems he employs anthropomorphosis. Here he is merely relating himself closely to another aspect of the countryside he knows and loves. Dialect is poetry of place. This is why 'The Lament of Swordy Well' employs so much of the vernacular: one would expect the place which represents for Clare his native land to speak with the native voice: "I've got among such grubbling geer"; "The ass no pindar'd dare to pound". It is in this poem that we hear most clearly Clare's distinct tone of radical voice: somewhere between Pilgrim's Progress and a folk ballad. He uses bees and rabbits to symbolise animals who live in harmonious communities and whose lives are also threatened by enclosure. Bees are traditionally a symbol of socialist revolution (as are the moles Clare describes in 'Remembrances') and the rabbits help Clare to extend his play upon the world 'level'. He argues that whilst enclosure is levelling the land in a literal sense, it is actually raising barriers both of class, and between man and nature: "Levels into a russet land / Nor leaves a bent behind". Nature and rural folk have been disempowered together: they are no longer able to perform the feats they once could: "There was a time my bit of ground / Made freemen of the slave". The poem's ending is a commentary upon the power of writing poetry. Whilst the mournful piece of land claims; "My name will quickly be the whole / That's left of Swordy Well", Clare is implying that the poem itself will stand as testament to the existence of Swordy Well. This theme is expanded in 'Remembrances' which is a 'Greatest Hits' of Clare's poetry, listing as it does all of the rural spots which Clare has left behind to be ravaged by enclosure. Like the American Indians, Clare feels betrayed by the fact that although he did not own the land, he felt that it was his. Progress did not recognise this claim and gave the land to the developers.

As has been said, Clare allies himself with the animals against man. He has taken dissent to its limits by renouncing his own humanity in disgust at the way humans have violated the countryside. This is particularly evident in the poems about birds' nests, for instance in 'To the Snipe' where seven of the twenty-two stanzas imply that the most significant attribute of the snipe's 'solitudes' is '[h]iding in spots that never knew his [man's] tread' (line 39). The repeated antipathy towards humanity is startling in this poem:

The bird's nest is threatened but never entirely violated by the encroachment of man. The delicate balance between safety (mentioned four times in this poem) and danger is potentially upset only by the presence of 'skulking' armed man. The nest of the bird remains hidden from man in general, but the poet has a special status and is able to find it. The poet then joins with nature, crouching inside the nest, "trembling" with the grass, able to "creep and walk and flye" with the "wild and timid clan". The nest is 'mystic' (repeated twice: lines 24 and 25) and a 'home alone' (line 4) 'where fear encamps / Around' (lines 3-4). The security of the nest is defined then by the continual 'fear' and 'dread' of humanity as much as it is by its lonely situation. The poem is a rare case of the speaker revealing what the contemplation of such scenes does for his own situation.