Moles, Molehills, and Common Right in John Clare’s Poetry

Abstract

JOHN CLARE'S MIDDLE-PERIOD POETRY SERVES AS A CULTURAL MARKER OF expropriation of commons and curtailment of common right in early nineteenth century. The poems identified as Clare's elegies document most visible forms of land expropriation: former common land is now marked as private by erection of fences and no-trespassing signs, and landscape is altered by deforestation of old-growth trees, elimination of grazing spaces between fields, and tillage of common land. In most instances, as J. M. Neeson argues succinctly, Enclosure meant extinction of common (1) Yet while enclosure, as Clare documents, closed off and transformed spaces that were commons, it did not fully extinguish practice of common right; enclosure encouraged in Clare's poetic a reconception of commons that reanimated claims to common right. Common right, as E. P. Thompson argues, allowed poor and propertyless to cultivate localized of private property, such as digging turf, gathering wood, foraging for food, or grazing animals. (2) These localized usages not only gave poor access to land-based resources, but of common right was also constitutive of a limited but vital sense of freedom, for commoners and communities, from vicissitudes of wage Peter Linebaugh argues, is embedded in a labor process; it inheres in a particular praxis of field, upland, forest, marsh, coast. Common rights are entered into by labor. (3) All forms of common right are entered into through with land and its resources, and this strategically resists individual ownership. Clare's post-enclosure poetry insists that of commoning is not undertaken by humans alone, but also by cooperating with work of non-human animals, plants, and natural processes. Although he never goes so far as to monetize of nature like current economists who suggest, for example, that economic value of of bees and other pollinators is worth roughly $250 billion per year, (4) Clare is particularly attuned to value created when nature Is left at her own silent for years. (5) Such acknowledgment of nature's challenges John Locke's labor theory of property as land that has been improved solely by human labor, and that property owners hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes common right of other men. (6) The Lockean concept of private property erases labor of propertyless poor, as Raymond Williams argues. (7) Yet Clare's poetry takes this critique even further by pointing to way in which both propertyless humans and non-human life are constandy contributing to productivity and improvement of land. Agricultural labor is not, as Locke would have it, the unquestionable property of labourer but rather is dependent upon of soil, plants, and animals. (8) The of possession of land by an individual, in other words, always involves dispossession of both working-class and non-human life that enable that endeavor. Clare's middle period poetry about work, both human and non-human, is inflected by georgic mode, which depicts human agricultural labor as heroically pressing land into productivity. (9) Yet Clare decenters georgic emphasis on human in order to tackle problem of how we might see or discern way agricultural is always dependent upon silent being done by natural processes. In order to contest privatization, Clare's poetry maps a topography of work of nature. For example, in Pleasant Spots ... very weeds are left free to flower Corn poppys red & carlock gleaming gold That makes corn field shine in summers hour Like painted skys--& fancys distant eye May well imagine armys inarching bye In all grand array of pomp & power (MP 4:299, lines 9-14) The flowers mark cornfield as an assertion of untrammeled life that coexists with cultivated wheat field. …