I DARE TO NAME THE HARE

Hare and Moon woodcut by Andrew Waddington: andrewwaddington.co.uk/Woodcuts

March is the time of the hare, an animal I love. The starting point of this poem is an anonymous enigmatic Middle English poem entitled 'Les noms de un leuvre en engleis' or 'The names of the Hare in English', which is reproduced and translated into modern English in the excellent book, 'The Leaping Hare', by George Ewart Evans and David Thomson.

I dare to name the hare

They dub him traitor,

Old Turpin,

lurker,

those who want to kill the hare

and lay down their hunting weapons

to try the use of deadly words.

Furze-cat, they say,

hedge-frisker,

the one who doesn’t go straight home,

the animal that dwells in the corn,

the animal that all men scorn.

Some would even go so far

(who, for their own reason,

wish to slay the hare with curses)

as to insist that his chief name is

Scoundrel.

I love the hare

more than any other creature.

I’ve seen him rule the shadows

between the ditch and hedge

as well as basking in the gory glow

of the Hunter’s Moon

when, in gruesome, lycanthropic nights of Autumn,

he dances in defiance of the fox -

or when, in the hare-brained dawns of March,

he spars with leaping shadows of himself

through low-slung mists,

and tears across the sparkling, frozen dew.

He is the freedom we all envy

and in our dreams would long to emulate.

Which of us, if there were gods in heaven

to answer our most secret prayers,

would not ask to be a hare?

And so the bitter, jealous souls

who, unlike him,

can never stand on open ground

and tap into the force

that spreads across the land,

christen him

the animal that no one dares to name.

For all these reasons

– and for many others I never could explain -

I dare to name the hare,

and call him:

Spirit of the Earth.