'Thine Unsuspecting Gratitude and Love'

We’ve had a damp spring and summer in Houston – thirty-nine inches of rain since the start of the year. No major storms but frequent brief showers, often in late afternoon. At this time nine years ago, Hurricane Harvey was about to hit, flooding my car and leaving us without power for four days. Lawns now are lush. Mosquitoes swarm in clouds. Step outside and get sucker-punched by the humidity. Our front garden is a jungle, almost taking over the sidewalk. 

Walter de la Mare published “Dry August Burned” in Memory and Other Poems in 1938, though it suggests the Great War years. August was the time when farmers traditionally burned stubble on their land, causing hares to flee the fire. World War I started in August 1914. The poem begins indoors:

“Dry August burned. A harvest hare

Limp on the kitchen table lay,

Its fur blood-blubbered, eye astare,

While a small child that stood near by

Wept out her heart to see it there.”

 

De la Mare had two daughters and two sons. He was sensitive to the lives of young children, their volatile emotional natures. Sounds attract the girl outside:

 

“. . . like a leveret she ran,

To feast her glistening bird-clear eyes

On a team of field artillery

Gay, to manoeuvres, thudding by.

Spur and gun and limber plate

Flashed in the sun.”

 

A leveret is a young hare. De la Mare describes the girl as “nibbling a green leaf,” like a leveret. She is dazzled by the “sun-tanned soldiery,” the field artillery, the spectacle:

 

“She turned, and ran,

Elf-like, into the house again.

The hare had vanished. . . . ‘Mother,’ she said,

Her tear-stained cheek now flushed with red,

‘Please, may I go and see it skinned?’”

 

Like many of de la Mare’s poems, “Dry August Burned” is a compressed short story, a revelation of character. He suggests even the youngest among us, the most seemingly innocent, knows bloodlust. We are the most savage species.

 

And yet, kindness persists. William Cowper (1731-1800) kept as pets three hares, Puss, Bess and Tiney. A neighboring child who had become bored with them gave them to the poet, who wrote a poem when Tiney died at age nine. When Cowper fed bread to his dog Marquis, he also fed Puss, who lived to the age of twelve. In The Task he writes of Puss:

 

“One sheltered hare

Has never heard the sanguinary yell

Of cruel man, exulting in her woes.

Innocent partner of my peaceful home,

Whom ten long years’ experience of my care

Has made at last familiar, she has lost

Much of her vigilant instinctive dread,

Not needful here, beneath a roof like mine.”

 

We suspect some animal lovers of virtue-signaling, wishing to advertise their compassion and sensitivity. One never detects this in Cowper. He could never have lived in London among the crowds and social demands. In Olney he found respite. When Cowper writes of hares and other animals, one senses his identification with these creatures, as in The Task:

   

“Yes—thou mayst eat thy bread, and lick the hand

That feeds thee; thou mayst frolic on the floor

At evening, and at night retire secure

To thy straw-couch, and slumber unalarmed;

For I have gained thy confidence, have pledged

All that is human in me to protect

Thine unsuspecting gratitude and love.

If I survive thee I will dig thy grave,

And when I place thee in it, sighing say,

I knew at least one hare that had a friend.”