Old Dog, New Tricks

Useful activity for the start of the month: read the appropriate segment of Clare's The Shepherd's Calendar. Sort of nostalgic for someone raised in England, except that mad, sad Clare's England is long gone. It's actually disappearing as Clare attempts to capture it - possibly the reason he's trying to catch it before it vanishes.

He begins June with an odd rhyme: Now summer is in flower and natures hum / Is never silent round her sultry bloom. I'm guessing his hum had a drawn-out vowel sound, but I haven't much idea of Northampton dialect. Later he rhymes blooms with broom, which would seem to confirm this. He seems quite unconcerned about the sibilance at the end of blooms, by the way. No wonder those early editors tried to clean him up and fence him in to acceptable boundaries. I suppose his escape from enclosure was to go crazy.

And talking of rhymes in June, I can't help but think of Procol Harum's fine lyricist Keith Reid's take on the hoariest rhyme of all. It comes in one of the great (and oddest) songs of the later end of the twentieth century, A Salty Dog, and it goes: Now many moons, and many Junes, have passed since we made land. Gary Brooker sings the line with such gusto that most listeners fail to catch just how quirky it is, reinvesting the cliche with a strange power.

Which I suppose is really what Clare is up - reinvesting our fallen world with something of the meaning it should possess for us. You'd need to be mad to try it.