Heathland poetry

There will be a longer post - as long as my connection lasts - consider this a stop-gap. I have the glums today - I will put it down to the weather - so I am having an indulgent half hour and would like to share this beautiful piece of poetry with you. It is John Clare's Emmonsails Heath in Winter:

I love to see the old heaths' withered brake
Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling
While the old Heron from the lonely lake
Starts slow and flaps its melancholy wing,
An oddling crow in idle motions swing
On the half rotten ash tree's topmost twig,
Beside whose trunk the gipsey makes his bed
Up flies the bouncing wood cock from the brig
Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread;
The field fare chatters in the whistling thorn
And for the awe round fields and closen rove,
And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove,
Fly down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again.

From memory, a "bumbarrel" is a Long Tailed Tit.