Saturday Rave: May from The Shepherd's Calendar by John Clare.

 This is, sadly, the last of The Word Den's regular visits to The Shepherd's Calendar. These posts weren't originally intended as a pandemic special; the idea for the series was sparked by my getting John Clare's book as a birthday present, which was in turn sparked by my discovering that I have family links to the Clares of Helpston in Lincolnshire (and also that some members of the family actually used to live in John Clare's cottage). 

But, serendipitously, Clare's verse couldn't have given us a better example of how to be happy at home.

Clare is overbrimming with the delights of May, and it's hard to pick just one passage to quote here. There's a whole catalogue of flowers, for instance, and the same of birds, each characterised carefully.

Perhaps, as this is The Word Den, we should leave Clare among his happy memories of childhood pleasures with his account of the writing lark.

The yellowhammer builds his nest

By banks where sun beams earliest rest

That dries the dew from off the grass

Shading it from all that pass

Save the rude boy wi ferret gaze

He finds its penciled eggs agen

All streaked wi lines as if a pen

By natures freakish hand was took

To scrawl them over like a book

& from these many mozzling marks

The schoolboy names them "writing larks"

photo by Charles J. Sharp

Photo by Didier Descouens - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25391092

Word To Use Today: mozzling. To mozzle is Australian slang for to hamper or impede. My copy of the OED doesn't record it as an English word, but it makes sense in this context (as camouflage to fool predators) and my guess is that it came to Australia from Helpston, or somewhere close by.