Abstract
In The Shepherd’s Calendar, Clare’s preoccupation with constancy vs change surfaces through attention to ritual, traditions, and the functioning of the community according to a cyclical year. The Calendar celebrates forms of knowledge dependent upon repetition, while exploiting poetic conventions which are themselves inherently repetitious. This chapter considers poetic self-consciousness, and the negotiation of sameness and fractional difference in descriptive poetry (especially in a Johnsonian context of specificity and generality): what might it really mean to ‘know’ something, and thus to represent it accurately? Clare’s writing registers that repetitions in the world and in poetry are never exactly the same, but posits irregularity as an aspect of natural regularity, indicative of nature’s artistry. The eponymous shepherd indicates Clare’s interest in knowledge amassed through repeated experience which is both individual and collective, and he illuminates Clare’s negotiation of the categories of lyric and narrative verse (themselves tied up with what it might mean to ‘know’ the subjects of the poem). Through close reading, the chapter examines Clare’s experiments with repetition, and, against the backdrop of a self-conscious attention to listening in the poem, suggests that they reflect upon the possibility of adequate expression in poetry.
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Notes
- 1.
John Clare: The Shepherd’s Calendar; Manuscript and Published Version, ed. Tim Chilcott (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006). References in this chapter will be to Clare’s (manuscript) version on the verso pages of Chilcott’s edition, unless otherwise stated.
- 2.
Chilcott, Shepherd’s Calendar, 114, lines 67–8.
- 3.
Chilcott, Shepherd’s Calendar, 156, lines 131–8.
- 4.
Chilcott, Shepherd’s Calendar, 192, lines 138 and 137.
- 5.
Michael O’Neill, introduction to Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 1997). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122852.001.0001.
- 6.
Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, ‘John Clare’s Speaking Voices: Dialect, Orality, and the Intermedial Poetic Text’, Essays in Romanticism 25.1 (2018): 100. For further illustration of Spenser’s engagement with literary heritage, see, for example, Lynn Staley Johnson, The Shepheardes Calender: An Introduction (University Park: Penn State Press, 2010), and David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).
- 7.
See Mina Gorji, John Clare and the Place of Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 84.
- 8.
Gorji, Place of Poetry, 96.
- 9.
See, for example, Jonathan Brown, Shepherds and Shepherding (Oxford: Shire Publications, 2013), 11: ‘The status of the shepherd was recognized by the nineteenth-century census returns, which gave him an entry in the occupational returns separate from the other agricultural workers’; see also Henry Stephens, The Book of the Farm, 3 vols (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1844), 1: 225–6.
- 10.
Chilcott, Shepherd’s Calendar, 140, line 112.
- 11.
Chilcott, Shepherd’s Calendar, 60, lines 100–01; 102; 107–12.
- 12.
For further examples of the shepherd’s observing and imagining, see Chilcott, Shepherd’s Calendar, ‘March’, 56, lines 4–10 and 60, lines 97–112; ‘April’, 74, lines 41–2, and 80, lines 155–6; ‘July’, 124 and 126, lines 16–54; and ‘August’, 142, lines 147–8.
- 13.
Chilcott, Shepherd’s Calendar, 172, lines 6–9.
- 14.
See, for example, Clare’s use of the verbal form, ‘to Calendar’, when listing the ‘perplexd multitude’ of women with whom he has had relationships: By Himself, 29.
- 15.
Chilcott, Shepherd’s Calendar, 44, lines 37–8.
- 16.
Hessey to Clare, 13 October 1823, in Critical Heritage, 194.
- 17.
Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: Random House, 1979), 148.
- 18.
See ‘John Clare’s Spenserian Lyric Fragments’, JCSJ 33 (2014): 73; 78.
- 19.
One of the best examples of a poem exhibiting this problematic self-consciousness is ‘St Martins Eve’ (Middle Period, 3: 269–78), but similarly, Clare is unable to share in Lubin’s ‘struck supprise’ or to join in the general mirth in ‘The Village Minstrel’ (Early Poems, 2: 123–179 [esp. line 528; lines 596–9]). In The Shepherd’s Calendar itself, ‘December—Christmas’ insists that the abandoned ‘mirth’ shared in ‘boyish days’ (lines 113–6) is now lost, though not forgotten. For further illustration and discussion of these characteristics, see Sarah Houghton-Walker, ‘The ‘Community’ of John Clare’s Helpston’, SEL 46, 4 (Autumn 2006): 796–97, or Sarah Houghton, ‘John Clare and Festivity’, JCSJ 23 (2004): 30–37.
- 20.
Peter McDonald, Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth Century-Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 27.
- 21.
McDonald, Sound Intentions, 18.
- 22.
William Wordsworth, ‘Note’ to ‘The Thorn,’ in Lyrical Ballads, ed. R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones (London and New York: Routledge, 1984), 288–9.
- 23.
See, for example, Bruce F. Kawin, Telling It Again and Again; Repetition in Literature and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972); Edward Said, ‘On Repetition’, in The World the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 111–125, and Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
- 24.
Middle Period, 3: 559–61. See 559, line 2.
- 25.
Jonathan Bate, ‘The Rights of Nature’, JCSJ 14 (1995): 14.
- 26.
Clare Jones, ‘John Clare, Rhymer’ (M.Phil diss., University of Cambridge, 2018), 32.
- 27.
For recent critical attention to Clare, specificity and generality, see Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, ‘Exemplary Figures in Clare’s Descriptive Poems’, JCSJ 36 (2017): 57–66; Michael Falk, ‘The nightjar’s shriek: nature’s variety in the sonnets of John Clare and Charlotte Smith’, JCSJ 36 (2017): 31–48, and Kelsey Thornton, ‘The Transparency of Clare’, JCSJ 21 (2002): 65–79.
- 28.
J.W. and Anne Tibble, The Prose of John Clare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 172.
- 29.
See Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and its Transformations, c.1650–c.1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 1–2.
- 30.
Eric Robinson, ‘John Clare and Weather Lore’, JCSJ 14 (1995): 74.
- 31.
Tibble, Prose, 200.
- 32.
Stephens, Book of the Farm, 1: 230.
- 33.
Stephens, Book of the Farm, 1: 292.
- 34.
Tim Chilcott, ‘John Clare’s Language’, JCSJ 35 (2016): 7.
Bibliography
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Thornton, Kelsey. ‘The Transparency of Clare’. JCSJ 21 (2002): 65–79.
Tibble, J. W. and Anne. The Prose of John Clare. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951.
Weiner, Stephanie Kuduk. ‘Exemplary Figures in Clare’s Descriptive Poems’. JCSJ 36 (2017): 57–66.
———. ‘John Clare’s Speaking Voices: Dialect, Orality, and the Intermedial Poetic Text’. Essays in Romanticism 25.1 (2018): 85–100.
White, Adam. ‘John Clare’s Spenserian Lyric Fragments’. JCSJ 33 (2014): 73–86.
Wordsworth, William. ‘Note’ to ‘The Thorn’. In Lyrical Ballads, edited by R. L. Brett and A.R. Jones, 288–9. London and New York: Routledge, 1984.
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Houghton-Walker, S. (2020). John Clare’s The Shepherd’s Calendar and Forms of Repetition. 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_7
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