Feather-Footed through the Plashy Fen
Robinson Crusoe was startled to see 'the print of a man's naked foot on the shore', but often it is a sign of animal life that catches the attention.
'I go among the fields and catch a glimpse of a stoat or a fieldmouse peeping out of the withered grass,' wrote the poet Keats to his brother and sister-in-law in 1819.
D. H. Lawrence imagined with pleasure 'A world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up.'
News that 'The snail's on the thorn' in Browning's Pippa Passes was an indication that all was right with the world.
Occasionally, wildlife is unwelcome: 'Beetles black, approach not near!' adjured Titania's fairies in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Animals are seen as they move across the landscape. Keats himself helped evoke the 'bitter chill' of the Eve of St Agnes with the line 'The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass.'
Gray, in his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, noted the 'solemn stillness' of the evening 'Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight'.
But perhaps one of the best-known descriptions is found in Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop, from the pen of the nature correspondent William Boot: 'Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.'
Elizabeth Knowles
01/07/2006
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