The leasow as a West Midlands term for pasture carries regional linguistic identity as part of its meaning — to use leasow rather than pasture or meadow is to speak from a specific place and linguistic tradition; A poet might write "the leasow lay quiet under the June afternoon, the cattle hardly moving in the deep grass, the entire field enclosed in its own unhurried time"; In the history of enclosure in the West Midlands, leasows were among the common pastures privatized and taken out of communal use — the loss of the leasow a local instance of the general destruction of common rights; John Clare's engagement with the specific vocabulary of his own region suggests the kind of linguistic rootedness that leasow represents — the poet who uses the word their community uses for a familiar landscape feature rather than the standardized literary term; The word's relative obscurity — even educated readers may not know it — creates a slight productive defamiliarization: the reader must pause, must acknowledge the existence of a word and a relationship to landscape they did not previously know; In contemporary poetry about regional identity and the survival of local knowledge, leasow appears as an example of the vocabulary that encodes a community's specific relationship to its own landscape.