Abstract
John Clare’s attention is frequently caught by the nests of birds and other animals. Many critics have concentrated on this dimension of his work. However, Clare’s animals are equally remarkable for their movement. In this chapter, I complement existing criticism by attending explicitly to Clare’s animals in motion. A sonnet from the Northborough period—‘The wild duck startles like a sudden thought’—is representative. Before it closes with birds that ‘nestle in the hedge below’, it spends thirteen of its fourteen lines evoking the striking manoeuvres of different birds in the air.
Clare is highly sensitive to the varied dynamics of animal movement and migration. The animals in his poetry are as much representatives of a disruptive refusal to be confined as they are concerned with questions of fragility or shelter. By emphasising the tendency of Clare’s poetry to think at larger scales than is normally recognised, the chapter aligns itself with those who have seen Clare as a poet who is not limited to dwelling in a particular place, but who is fascinated by the dynamics of both physical and poetic space. It also argues that Clare’s writing might usefully nuance some existing coordinates of ecocriticism.
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Notes
- 1.
John Goodridge, ‘Poor Clare’, The Guardian, July 22 (2000).
- 2.
Timothy Morton, ‘John Clare’s Dark Ecology’, Studies in Romanticism 47 (2008): 179–93.
- 3.
It is, for example, included in Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, eds., The Rattle Bag: An Anthology of Poetry (London: Faber, 1982), 248 and in Neil Philip, ed., The New Oxford Book of Children’s Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 25.
- 4.
Critical Heritage, 308.
- 5.
Later Poems, 2: 705, lines 1–7.
- 6.
Oxford English Dictionary Online.
- 7.
OED.
- 8.
Seamus Heaney, ‘John Clare: A bi-centenary lecture’, in John Clare in Context, 134.
- 9.
Critical Heritage, 69.
- 10.
Onno Oerlemans, Poetry and Animals: Blurring the Boundaries With the Human (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 105.
- 11.
See, for example, David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 89–103; and on animal sound, see Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, ‘Listening with John Clare’, Studies in Romanticism 48:3 (2009): 371–90; Sam Ward ‘“To list the song & not to start the thrush”: John Clare’s acoustic ecologies’, JCSJ 29 (2010): 15–32; Matthew Rowney, ‘Music in the Noise: The Acoustic Ecology of John Clare’, Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies 1.1 (2016): 23–40.
- 12.
An exception is Katey Castellano, ‘Moles, Molehills, and Common Right in John Clare’s Poetry’, Studies in Romanticism 56 (2017), 157–76.
- 13.
The OED records how animals ‘are typically able to move about, though this ability is sometimes restricted to a particular stage in their life cycle’. The movement of animals is, for example, central to Aristotle’s biology: see Aristotle, Parts of Animals, Movement of Animals, Progression of Animals, ed. A. L. Peck and E. S. Forster, Revised edn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).
- 14.
Middle Period, 5: 269–70.
- 15.
By Himself, 37–8.
- 16.
By Himself, 37–8.
- 17.
Natural History, 312. For an extended consideration, see Weiner, ‘Listening with John Clare’: 384–8. As a compliment to Weiner’s focus on listening, I discuss the act of voicing in a forthcoming piece entitled ‘Voicing John Clare’s nonhuman onomatopoeia’.
- 18.
Natural History, 237. By Clare’s measurements, the snail is travelling at 0.00410354 miles per hour. Clare was aware of other methods for measuring animal movement. For example, he describes ‘a man curious to know how far his bees travelld in a summers day’ who dusted them with flour and ‘having to go to the market that day he passd by a turnip field in full flower about 5 miles from home & to his supprise he found some of his own in their white powderd coats’ (60).
- 19.
Natural History, 66.
- 20.
Natural History, 92.
- 21.
Natural History, 66.
- 22.
For excellent work on the relationship between religion and nature in Clare, see Sarah Houghton-Walker, John Clare’s Religion (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 133–72, and Emma Mason, ‘Ecology with religion: kinship in John Clare’ in Simon Kövesi and Scott McEathron, eds., New Essays on John Clare: Poetry, Culture and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 97–117.
- 23.
Early Poems, 1: 5–7, lines 5–6, line 13.
- 24.
Natural History, 69.
- 25.
Natural History, 69–70, 111–13.
- 26.
By Himself, 161. I am grateful to Erin Lafford for bringing this passage to my attention.
- 27.
Bate, Biography, 483–4. Dudley’s visit led Clare to complain that he wanted to be ‘a free man again and go where I please. I am sick of this place, where I have no companions but mad-men’. See also Clare, Letters, 670.
- 28.
Even when writing about the disappearance of liberty from England, Clare uses the word in an avian simile: ‘Like emigrating birds thy freedom’s flown’. See VM, 1: 50.
- 29.
Angela K. Turner, Swallow (London: Reaktion, 2015), 8. Reflecting a contested etymology, she adds that ‘the name is probably originally from the earlier Proto-Germanic swalwo, meaning a cleft stick, alluding to the barn swallow’s forked tail’.
- 30.
Natural History, 38.
- 31.
Turner, Swallow, 92.
- 32.
Natural History, 175, 188, 235. The swallows and martins also make their appearance at the end of ‘April’ and the beginning of ‘May’ in The Shepherd’s Calendar, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and Geoffrey Summerfield, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 44, 46.
- 33.
Natural History, 38.
- 34.
Early Poems, 2: 545, lines 1–2.
- 35.
Middle Period, 5: 337, lines 1–2, line 11.
- 36.
Middle Period, 2: 208–9, lines 1–2, lines 13–14. Elsewhere, Clare is sceptical about the usefulness of almanacs, describing the ‘fresh budget of wonderful predictions’ in ‘Moors Almanack’ as merely ‘pretending truth’ (By Himself, 201; see also 171).
- 37.
Heaney, ‘A bi-centenary lecture’, 134, 137.
- 38.
Natural History, xxxvii; Bate, Biography, 277; Alan Vardy, John Clare, Politics and Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 136–7.
- 39.
Letter from Hessey, 7 September 1824, Egerton MS 2246, fol. 377–8, quoted in Vardy, Clare, Politics and Poetry, 136–7.
- 40.
For a summary, see Turner, Swallow, 50–4.
- 41.
Thomas Forster, Observations on the Brumal Retreat of the Swallow, 5th edn (London: printed for Thomas and George Underwood, 1817), 28–9. See also a summary of Forster’s position in William Hone, The Every Day-Book, or, The Guide to the Year (London: printed for William Hone, 1825), 505–12.
- 42.
Middle Period, 4: 328.
- 43.
Early Poems, 1: 374–5, lines 41–4.
- 44.
Later Poems, 2: 705–6, lines 1–4.
- 45.
Derek Attridge, Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 48.
- 46.
Thomas C. Gannon, Skylark Meets Meadowlark: Reimagining the Bird in British Romantic and Contemporary Native American Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 184.
- 47.
Roger Sales, John Clare: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 6.
- 48.
Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 79, 81. Oerlemans acknowledges that the analogy is complicated by ‘the continuous harassment’ of animals by ‘these same working poor’.
- 49.
Tom Paulin, ‘John Clare: A Bicentennial Celebration’, in Richard Foulkes, ed., John Clare: A Bicentenary Celebration (Northampton: University of Leicester, Department of Adult Education, 1994), 69–78 (74), quoted by Simon Kövesi in John Clare: Nature, Criticism and History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 3, 62n.
- 50.
See, for example, John Goodridge’s claim that, ‘while Clare’s nest poems have important elements in common, they also possess far more variety’ than might have been allowed for if they had been concentrated in one collection, in John Clare and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 135.
- 51.
Heaney , ‘A bi-centenary lecture’, 143. For an excellent and detailed study which focuses on Clare’s formal capability, see the first half of Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, Clare’s Lyric: John Clare and Three Modern Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
- 52.
Sara Guyer also offers a sophisticated reading of and challenge to this concern with home in the final chapter of Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 78–100.
- 53.
James C. McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 89.
- 54.
Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000), 153.
- 55.
Most influential are the English translations of the essays ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ and ‘“… Poetically Man Dwells …”’ in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 141–59 and 209–27.
- 56.
For more on this widening scale of significance specifically in Clare’s work, see David Higgins, ‘John Clare: The Parish and the Nation’ in Romantic Englishness: Local, National and Global Selves, 1780–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 86–108.
- 57.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 94; Bate, The Song of the Earth, 158.
- 58.
Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
- 59.
Mason, ‘Ecology with religion’, 106; Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press), 6.
- 60.
Middle Period, 2: 34, lines 1–5.
- 61.
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 100. I am grateful to Aidan Tynan for reminding me of this passage.
- 62.
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 4.
- 63.
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 58.
- 64.
Kövesi, John Clare: Nature, Criticism and History, 1–77.
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Castell, J. (2020). John Clare’s Dynamic Animals. In: Kӧvesi, S., Lafford, E. (eds) Palgrave Advances in John Clare Studies. Palgrave Advances. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43374-1_8
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