Started the month with a quick read of the appropriate segment of Clare's The Shepherd's Calendar, as is my customary practice. On this day a particularly poignant reminder of typically English landscapes. For the first time I consciously noticed how the consistent present tense of the great mad poet's descriptions evokes a kind of timeless present. For example the random dog, lovingly observed in the February thaw, is seemingly ever present to any reader at any time, captured in his daft, pointless pursuit of crows and larks and hares:
As crows from morning perches flye / He barks and follows them in vain / Een larks will catch his nimble eye / And off he starts and barks again / Wi breathless haste and blinded guess / Oft following where the hare hath gone / Forgetting in his joys excess / His frolic puppy days are gone
In the joy of the present moment lies a kind of immortality.
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