Keeping Nature at Bay: John Clare’s Poetry of Wonder

Abstract

THE PREOCCUPATION, AMONG ROMANTIC POETS, WITH THE IDEA OF place, along with a belief in genius loci and notion of achieving a heightened sensibility towards nature, have been important topics in Romanticism--especially in studies of Wordsworth, whose Prelude remains a classic example of how a poet's relation to and knowledge of natural world can influence his creative work. No poet more than John Clare suggests kind of extreme attentiveness towards nature that might be construed as characterizing term sensibility in its (and pre-Romantic) sense. Perhaps this is why most twentieth-century critical accounts of Clare--most notably Harold Bloom's, but more recently eco-critical accounts, too--have placed this lesser-known poet among visionary company of his more famous contemporaries for having a similar kind of poetics when it comes to writing about nature. (1) But such a comparison is apt only when one reads Clare's most typically Romantic or Wordsworthian verses, such as frequently anthologized poem Am, to exclusion of his more than a thousand others (he was an exceedingly prolific poet). Contrary to much of what is written about them, Clare's best poems--his hundreds of short pieces about birds and other farm-side animals and their habitats--often leave reader questioning how this poet actually relates to objects he describes. It is precisely Clare's mode of vision (and by this phrase I mean way that poet literally sees his environment) that distinguishes him from many of his contemporaries, who more readily pursue a deep and spiritual knowledge of world around them. Unlike Keats in Ode to a Nightingale, or Shelley in Mont Blanc, or Wordsworth in his account of climbing Snowdon at end of The Prelude, Clare hesitates to seek communion with natural world, despite his obvious passion for its animals and scenes. Instead, Clare maintains a distance between himself and nature, usually by imbuing his natural descriptions with a sense of wonder rather than claiming any intimate or specialized knowledge of them. (2) Consider, for instance, small ways that Clare separates himself from scene of following poem about a flock of sheep in wintertime: The sheep get up and make their many tracks & bear a load of snow upon their backs & gnaw frozen turnip to ground With sharp quick & then noising The that pecks turnips all day & knocks his hands to keep cold away & laps his legs in straw to keep them warm & hides behind hedges from storm The sheep as tame as dogs where he goes & try to shake their fleeces from snows Then leave their frozen meal and wander The stubble stack that stands behind ground & lye all night and face drizzling storm & shun hovel where they might be warm (3) In his attentiveness to actions, hunger, and cold of sheep, Clare shifts perspective of his poem away from speaker and towards animals themselves. Many of verbs he uses to describe flock's movements are strong and memorable--bear, gnaw, bite noise, face, and shun--and these words focus poem on sheep rather than on speaker, who is notably absent unless we read the boy as a version of him. The double use of rhymed pairs ground/round and warm/storm, with their chiastic word order (Clare reverses rhymes in their second appearance), helps reinforce perpetuity of cold. In a clever enjambment that subjugates turnip into grammatical object of preposition round rather than as a subject of his own verb, Clare makes sure to bury his four lines about human experience of cold in middle of a landscape (and a sonnet) composed primarily of sheep. They go noising / The boy, he writes, developing an undercurrent of sheep-song (noising) from what was presumably a visual cue (the image of sheep nosing through a field)--and sheep's song muffles his own. …