University of Birmingham
Clare on Wordsworth
Hodgson, Andrew
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Hodgson, A 2017, 'Clare on Wordsworth' Wordsworth Circle.
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Clare on Wordsworth
Andrew Hodgson
UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM
Clare “would uniformly become animated when anybody spoke to him of
Wordsworth,” said De Quincey, “– animated with the most hearty and almost
rapturous spirit of admiration. As regarded his own poems, this admiration seemed to
have an unhappy effect of depressing his confidence in himself. It is unfortunate,
indeed, to gaze too closely upon models of colossal excellence” (Critical Heritage 246).
De Quincey’s judgement appeared in 1840; the following summer, Clare published a
sonnet, “To Wordsworth”, which shows a poet emboldened rather than “depressed” by
his admiration:
WORDSWORTH I love; his books are like the fields,
Not filled with flowers, but works of human kind;
The pleasant weed a fragrant pleasure yields,
The briar and broomwood shaken by the wind,
The thorn and bramble o’er the water shoot
A finer flower than gardens e’er gave birth,
The aged huntsman grubbing up the root –
I love them all as tenants of the earth:
Where genius is, there often die the seeds;
What critics throw away I love the more;
I love to stoop and look among the weeds,
1
To find a flower I never knew before:
Wordsworth, go on – a greater poet be;
Merit will live, though parties disagree!
As is often the case in a Clare sonnet, an initial broad-brush statement of feeling (“I
love”) is discharged through a series of images which complicate and embellish its
character. If Clare appears to begin by praising Wordsworth as a poet of nature, his
first two lines spring a surprise. Wordsworth’s poems are “like the fields,” Clare says,
precisely because they are not filled with “flowers,” but “works of human kind.” The
point is that Wordsworth, like Clare himself, knows “the fields” not to be a pastoral
idyll. Still, it is “flowers” rather than humans that Clare turns attention to for the rest
of the octave, as he builds towards another expression of “love” – this time for the
plants he regards as “tenants of the earth”. These lines contain a series of allusions to
Wordsworth: “briar” and “broomwood”, for instance, crop up in “The Waterfall and
the Eglantine”, which Clare acknowledged as a favourite; Wordsworth’s “Beggars”
describes “a weed of glorious feature” as “beautiful to see” (18); and “the aged
huntsman” recalls “Simon Lee.” i But the lines’ relation with Clare’s initial position is
puzzling. Timothy Webb suggests that the allusions show Clare “concerned to
discover in Wordsworth an alternative nature to the artificial one presented by
gardens” (Webb 230), but that jars with the poem’s praise for Wordsworth’s attention
to “works of human kind”; it might be better to say that that Clare embraces what he
sees as Wordsworth’s extension of common feeling to the neglected human and
botanical dwellers in “the fields.” An alternative interpretation (still at odds with
Clare’s celebration of Wordsworth’s focus on the “human” as a badge of authenticity)
2
is that Clare is not cataloguing favourite effects in Wordsworth’s poems at all: John
Ashbery ventures that the lines ought to be understood as a “half-comic lapse” in
which “Clare seems momentarily to lose sight of his homage in order to get down in
the grass, his favourite occupation, before righting himself” (Ashbery 13-14). Read like
this, the lines come over as a self-ironizing embodiment of the delight in nature for its
own sake that distinguishes Clare’s descriptive art from Wordsworth’s more reflective
practice.
Clare “rights himself” in the sestet through a reflection on “genius” whose
syntax, if still suggestively jumbled, is more controlled in its effect. The punctuation is
likely to be the publisher’s rather than Clare’s, but has the virtue of preserving the
lines’ ambiguity, which depends upon the way the central two lines hinge between
those either side of them. Clare begins with a statement on the fate of “genius” which
brandishes his critical independence in defending Wordsworth, but which also
reverberates with the pathos of Clare’s own neglect. The pair of lines that follows, “I
love to stoop and look among the weeds, / To find a flower I never knew before”,
might be taken as developing this argument (“critics might overlook them, but I love
unearthing as-yet undiscovered poets”) – though the accuracy of describing
Wordsworth in 1841 as a dweller among the poetic “weeds” is dubious. Or, if one
regards the poem as a defence of Clare’s fidelity to nature in spite of his admiration for
Wordsworth’s more “human” enterprise, the lines might also be read as a preparation
for the final couplet:
I love to stoop and look among the weeds,
To find a flower I never knew before:
3
Wordsworth, go on – a greater poet be;
Merit will live, though parties disagree!
What is attractive about the lines when taken as a unit like this is their balance of
humility against independence. So although Clare acknowledges that a poetry which
“stoops and looks among the weeds,” busying itself with minutiae, incurs a cost, and
waves Wordsworth on to be “a greater poet,” the “Merit” which endures in spite of
disagreement in that final line is as much Clare’s own as it is Wordsworth’s. Clare
genuflects to Wordsworth even as he holds firm to his own way of doing things.
Clare’s argument in “To Wordsworth” warps under the complex of responses
with which he grapples: enthusiasm, self-assurance, and self-deprecation jostle with
an energy that belies De Quincey’s portrait of Wordsworth’s influence. The poem is
the culmination of a series of ambivalent responses to Wordsworth that ran through
Clare’s career. Admiration and reservation alike were crucial in the development of
Clare’s independence as a poet. “[W]hen I first began to read poetry I dislikd
Wordsworth because I heard he was dislkd”, Clare wrote in a journal entry in 1824: “I
was astonishd when I lookd into him to find my mistaken pleasure in being delighted
and finding him so natural and beautiful
in his ‘White doe of Rylston’ there is some
of the sweetest poetry I ever met with tho full of his mysterys” (By Himself 190). In
Clare’s letters and poems a see-sawing admiration for Wordsworth often pivots on a
fascinated mistrust of his “mysterys”. The sense that Wordsworth’s poetry is
troublingly out of reach colours the first mention of Wordsworth in Clare’s
correspondence, a note to his friend Octavius Gilchrist in December 1819,
accompanying the return of a copy of Wordsworth’s poems (Letters 23-4). ii Only at
4
this early stage of Clare’s development does De Quincey’s account of his “depressed
confidence” hold water. Clare passes no comment on the poems themselves, but
included with the letter a sixteen-line sonnet “To Poesy”, confessing his inability to
express how poetry’s “secret magic moves me” (5):
thou art far above me
Words are too weak expression cant be had
I can but say I love & dearly love thee
And that thou cheer’st me when my soul is sad
Though the sonnet is not directly addressed to Wordsworth, its inclusion in the letter
hints that it deals with feelings provoked by Clare’s reading of his poems. Clare feels
poetic powers to be so far “above” him that, appropriately, “expression cant be had” to
describe the gulf. Yet in saying as much, Clare achieves a muted eloquence. Many
Romantic-period poems (including many of Clare’s own) confess the inadequacy of
language with an inventiveness that implies, as Michael O’Neill has observed, that
“such inadequacy is itself a witness to the reality of the vision that cannot be
expressed” (O’Neill 17). But here there is a touching dignity in Clare’s refusal to strain
against artistic “weakness”. If “I can but say I love & dearly love thee” borders
tautology, read another way it takes care over a distinction between “saying” you love
someone, and actually doing the loving. And the writing moves to an affectingly
downbeat close: Clare welcomes poetry’s power to “cheer”, but only in the context of a
confession of periods when “my soul is sad.”
5
By Clare’s next mention of Wordsworth, in a letter to Markham Sherwill the
following summer, the depressed spirits of “To Poesy” have given way to inquisitive
self-assurance:
do you know personaly Wordsworth & Colridge, they are two favourites with
me
have you seen Wordsworths last production ‘Sonnets to the River
Duddon’
Bridge’
they call em good
how like you his Sonnet on ‘Westminster
I think it (& woud say it to the teeth of the critic in spite of his rule &
compass) that it owns no equal in the English language
Miltons I reckon little
of keeping the ‘Paradise lost’ in view – one might have expected far better but
he sat down to write according to the rul[es of] art in the construction of the
Sonnet just as a architect sets about abuilding while wordsworth defies all art &
in the lunatic Enthuseism of nature he negligently sets down his thoughts from
the tongue of his inspirer (Letters 86-7).
The letter is buoyed by a sense of shared endeavour. Jonathan Bate is right to remark
that it “makes Wordsworth’s method of composition sound more like Clare’s own than
it really was” (Bate 195), iii but that is only a sign of Clare’s growing self-belief. The
letter shows Clare fashioning Wordsworth’s achievement in his own image, using his
response to pave the way towards the kind of poetry he wants to write. In his
evocation of “the lunatic Enthuseism of nature” Clare rises to one of the most
exhilarating Romantic-period vignettes of “naturalness” and spontaneity; and his
embrace of unself-conscious “negligence” shows far greater abandon than Wordsworth
in its effort to seek correspondence between artistic and natural process. Clare signs
6
off with a flash of self-confidence: Wordsworth “is a poet with whom for origionallity
of description the present day has few if any equals – for the present” (Letters 87).
Elsewhere in the letter, however, Clare is more on his guard: “don’t think I
favour his affected fooleries in some of his longer pieces theres some past all bearing.”
Clare’s enthusiasm for Wordsworth as a model for what is “natural and beautiful” was
recurrently checked by a worry that there is something “affected” about Wordsworth’s
manner. Clare returned to these “fooleries” in a letter written eighteen months later,
on December 6, 1821, whilst comparing Wordsworth and Crabbe:
I like Wordsworth better then Crabb after all I can read a poem of the former
twice over with added pleasure & feel satisfyd with the latter for the first time &
if I take him again my former fondeness dwindles to mawkishness but W. W.s
Nursery ryhmes are ridiculous so much so that reading them gives me the itch
of parody which I cannot resist – I did try one the other day to ease my mind
(Letters 221-2)
Clare’s words exude growing critical independence. The parody Clare mentions is
probably his “Sonnet After the Manner of X X X X X” (Middle Period II 7). ivv In keeping
with Clare’s productively conflicted attitude to Wordsworth, the poem has in its sights
the sonnet Clare said “owns no equal in the English language” (Letters 86), “Composed
upon Westminster Bridge”:
I sought my little walking stick that
Stood behind the door oth office and
7
From the peg by the wall I reached my hat
& started to view the expanse of air sea land
Of the visibly created world Business
Had long confined me to its trammels so
I felt the delight more keenly In a dress
Of mightiest magnificance did flow
The garments of the universe The sky
Was like a broad blue looking glass & O
The joys of creations myriads was excessive
Why I saw the oxen like Philosophers repose
Profoundly by the mighty depths & I
Would have plunged into its mysterys but O my cloaths
Taylor was ambivalent: “I cannot quite admire your Imitation of Wordsworth, though
it is very clever” (Letters 231); Clare retorted: “do you mistake my imitation of W W as
a serious attempt in his manner – twas written in ridicule of his affectations of
simplicity” (Letters 231). But the force of the poem’s “ridicule” depends upon its
“imitation”, for all its exaggeration, striking home. Clare means something other by
“affectations of simplicity” than the triteness Coleridge had in mind when he criticized
a fashion for “downright simpleness, under the affectation of simplicity” in Biographia
Literaria (Engell and Bate, eds. I 75); but his parody shares the feeling for the
contradictions riddling Wordsworth’s embrace of “the real language of men” that
Coleridge demonstrated in his well-known chapters. Perhaps surprisingly, what is at
stake for Clare is a question of decorum: Clare trains a half-sceptical, half-nonplussed
8
eye upon Wordsworth’s mingling of colloquial brio with abstruse speculation. As his
poem’s grammatical control topples under the weight of its excitement (“the expanse
of air sea land”), or lurches jeeringly over its line endings (“I saw the oxen like
Philosphers repose / Profoundly”) it pokes fun at a disingenuous brand of “simplicity,”
one that cloaks “mysterys” in a pretence of straightfowardness. The poem’s
culminating rhyme sets Wordsworthian “repose” against the trappings of day-to-day
existence: “I / Would have plunged into its mysterys but O my cloaths.” Thanks to its
enjambed opening and extra metrical feet, the sentence seems to overspill the line at
either side, as though mimicking the awkward accommodation between
Wordsworthian “mysterys” and lived experience it exposes. The joke is both innocuous
and startling. To take it seriously would be to deny the possibility of metaphor; and yet
its literal-minded exposure of the absurdities underlying a mind prepared to imagine
that a city wears “garments” carries an uncanny force.
The effect of the sonnet as a whole is to animate the common sense objections
to Wordsworth’s habits of mind with a force not unlike Yvor Winters’ skewering of the
sonnet’s “romantic pomposity:” “the river does not glide at its own sweet will, and this
is very fortunate for London; the river glides according the law of gravitation, and a
much better line could have been made of this fact” (Winters 168). Except the geniality
of Clare’s tone is such that if one emerges from the poem with a renewed respect for
the precision and restraint with which Clare in his own sonnets keeps his eye on the
object, one also appreciates the art with which Wordsworth negotiates the potential
absurdities Clare mocks. Clare’s tone also reflects a strand of genuine perplexity. The
poem lacks the self-satisfaction of most parodies. Clare gives the impression of being
faintly puzzled by his subject, and his energies are directed, in part, towards an effort
9
to pin down just what the flaws and virtues of Wordsworth’s manner are. The poem
was written in 1821 when Clare’s own style was still maturing: as much as it scratches
Clare’s “itch of parody,” it reveals a readiness to adopt Wordsworthian modes and
perspectives that later poems would put to more serious ends.
Clare wrote to Taylor in March 1826 advancing the uncontroversial opinion that
Wordsworth was one of the two “most origional poets of the day” and the rather less
conventional judgement that he shared that honour with John Wilson:
I think Wordsworth & Wilson are the most origional poets of the day & have
more materials to make up what I consider real poetry then half the rest (or
perhaps all) put together
the difference is that they have great faults mixed [
] with great beautys while the others tho they have no beautys [
order have few or no faults to lessen them – but I sha[ll
] high an
] no more now as I
mean to read both of them over very carefully & write some trifles on their
faults & beautys in a plain and fearless manner for a new Work that I have been
solicited to write for (Letters 371-2; square brackets denote points at which the
manuscript is torn).
Clare seems never to have embarked upon the “new Work” promised here; from the
mid-1820s onward it is in his poems, rather than his letters, that he grapples most
fruitfully with the “faults & beautys” of Wordsworth’s “origionallity.” Clare fosters an
ability to deploy Wordsworthian phrasing and situations in a way that pays tribute
while asserting a rival vision. A characteristic instance occurs in the encounter with a
quail’s nest in the 1832 lyric “I wandered out one rainy day” (Middle Period V 291).
10
There is a quiet wit in the opening line’s drab transformation of “I wandered lonely as
a cloud” (rain being the consequence of clouds); and, as he considers the quail, Clare
rejects Wordsworthian outpourings for a more humdrum mode of reportage:
Among the stranger birds they feed
Their summer flight is short & slow
Theres very few know where they breed
& scarcely any where they go
(17-20)
The language (“very few to love”, “few could know”) is picked up from “She dwelt
among th’untrodden ways” (4, 9). But rather than recording a flash of privileged
insight, as Wordsworth’s poem does, Clare simply states what he does and does not
know about the bird’s behaviour. Yet the lines retain a power to beguile. The allusions
help to shape a double impact of stating plainly the secretiveness of the bird, and
holding open the impression that something has gone untold. For all his impatience
with Wordsworth’s “mysterys”, Clare’s descriptive mode achieves its own enigmatic
power.
Clare borrows from Wordsworth most persistently, however, not to assert his
own “originallity of description,” but in when he turns to poetry as a medium for
working through questions of literary language and the relationship between the
imagination, art, and nature. The force of Clare’s poems in this mode derives less from
the persuasiveness of their arguments than their idiosyncratic, looping lines of
thought and twisting engagement with Wordsworth and other poets. A sonnet from
11
1832, “The Pleasures of Poesy” (Middle Period IV 582), opens with “Tintern Abbey” in
mind, as Clare explores poetry’s ability to provide “reccompence” amid suffering:
To me hath poesy been a reccompence
& pleasure not to be described – but bye
The inward thought – words cannot tell from whence
The feelings that the still heart profits by
In brooding moods where fancy loves to lye
Afar from all ambitions but her own
Picturing strange landscapes of delight & joy
Beautys delightful places – where the eye
Sees things more fair than earth hath ever known
Where the great masters of the past inherit
Green memories & glad visions that atone
For all the troubles & disquietude
That spurning fortune leaveth with their merit
Marring their lives with tempests ever rude
To begin with, the obviousness of the theft is tinged with the air of a poet sceptically
trying out an idiom that he is not wholly convinced by: “To me hath poesy been a
reccompence / & pleasure not to be described” gives the same impression of a poet
amusedly trying a language on for size as Byron’s cod-Wordsworthian paean to nature
in Childe Harold (“Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part / Of me and of my
soul, as I of them?” (III 707-8; McGann, ed.)). But Clare soon warms to the idiom, and
12
the poem hurtles on in a manner entirely its own: the tumbling progress of the writing
enacts a mode of poetic “reccompence” that embraces rather than abandons the
energies of the “thoughtless youth” Wordsworth leaves behind in “Tintern Abbey.”
Clare’s syntax as he explores the “inward” sources of poetry has an impressiveness at
one with its teetering control. No other poet uses the poetic line to suggest the rush of
thoughts and feelings quite as Clare does: after the opening remark it is hard to see
where you might put a full stop (the technique comes over as an idiosyncratic
development from the Wordsworthian manner he had earlier parodied). Yet for all his
gusto, Clare shades his borrowings from Wordsworth with a sober awareness of
poetry’s limitations. “The feelings that the still heart profits by / In brooding moods
where fancy loves to lye / Afar” re-arranges the materials of “and all that mighty heart
is lying still” from “Westminster Bridge” (14), allowing “lye” to flicker with the
suggestion of deception before momentum is pulled over the line ending; “things
more fair than earth has ever known” evokes “Earth has nothing to show so fair,”
whilst sustaining a less sunny outlook on the relationship between ordinary and poetic
experience. The poem’s closing lines, though they express gratitude to poetry’s ability
to “atone / For all the troubles and disquietude,” promote a sharpened apprehension
that such “troubles” exist to be escaped from, and continue, in Clare’s forcefully
positioned verb, to “Marr” lives.
Clare’s most densely allusive performance in this mode is “Pastoral Poesy,” a
poem which revolves around, without ever settling into, Clare’s belief that “the stuff
which true poesy is made of is little else” than the “universal feelings” stirred by
contact with nature (By Himself 53). Geoffrey Grigson described the poem as a
“curious extract of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Clare” (Grigson 16), and one of its
13
most “curious” features is its habit of “extracting” the words of previous writers to
argue that poetry is found in nature. Seeking to enlist Wordsworth and Coleridge to a
vision of poetry as a “universal” product of nature, Clare is never able relinquish
awareness that poetry is an artistic phenomenon.
The paradox grants Clare’s arguments a rough, provisional life; the poem is
teased and teasing about poetic language as something that both intrudes upon and
intensifies the mind’s engagement with nature. Clare starts by downplaying the
importance of “words”:
True poesy is not in words
But images that thoughts express
By which the simplest minds are stirred
To elevated happiness
(1-4)
The lines follow the contours of some admiring remarks Clare made about Charlotte
Smith: “she wrote more from what she had seen of nature than what she had read of it
there fore those that read her poems find new images which they have not read of
before tho they have often felt them and from those associations poetry derives the
power of pleasing in the happiest manner” (Grainger, ed. 34). Clare is groping towards
a definition of poetry where “words” serve only as substitutes for emotions or
experiences open to everyone in nature. But Clare’s disparagement of words has a
verbal interest of its own. The defining phrase “images that thoughts express,” for
instance, refuses to come easily into focus. Presumably, “images” is to be taken as the
14
subject of “express” and “thoughts” as the object. But the inversion raises the
possibility that the grammar falls more in line with the word order, and that it is
actually “thoughts” that is the subject of “express.” When such a reading is entertained
the line incorporates an awareness of the role of human creativity in poetry that
challenges the apparently dominant idea in the poem that poetry is merely a matter of
copying nature down, as if to say: “it is not just that poetry consists of images that
capture familiar thoughts and feelings, but also of images that are ‘expressed’ by or are
the creative product of those thoughts.”
Clare tangles up the two positions – that poetry is a natural, and an artistic
phenomenon – creating a poem seldom reducible to a single or stable perspective. At
its baldest, Clare’s insistence on poetry’s democratic appeal risks blandness. Nuance is
lost when he flattens Wordsworth’s talk in “Tintern Abbey” of a “presence that
disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts” (95-6) into “elevated happiness.” But
when, two stanzas later, Clare brings Wordsworth into play to embellish his case for
“poesy” as a natural “language,” the corrugations of his syntax again get in the way of
any aspiration toward summing up “true poesy” in an easy slogan:
…poesy is a language meet
& fields are every ones employ –
The wild flower neath the shepherd’s feet
Looks up & gives him joy
A language that is ever green
That feelings unto all impart
15
As awthorn blossoms soon as seen
Give may to every heart
(9-16)
Clare’s wild flower grows from the Immortality Ode’s, “The pansy at my feet / Does the
same tale repeat” (54-5). In Wordsworth’s poem this couplet deflates the rhythms of
his fourth stanza to precipitate a moment of crisis: “Whither is it gone the visionary
gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” (56-7). Clare shuns this
anxiousness, allowing the lines instead to blossom into what seems a simple
elaboration of his faith in the lasting significance of nature’s “poesy:” “A language that
is ever green / That feelings unto all impart.” The phrase has axiomatic snap, but it is
also the point at which the seemingly transparent flow of the lines becomes muddied.
Clare gives the impression of saying that poetry is something that exists at its purest in
nature, something that stirs up, or “gives” feelings or experiences to everyone. And
that is what his imagery suggests:
The wild flower neath the shepherd’s feet
Looks up & gives him joy
…’awthorn blossoms soon as seen
Give may to every heart
16
But it is not quite what that phrase that is sandwiched between them says. If you
wanted it to fall into line with these images you would have to read its grammar
slightly differently:
A language that is ever green
That feeling unto all imparts
Yet this is not what Clare wrote. He does not say that poetry imparts feeling to
everyone, but rather that it is a language that “feelings unto all impart,” that poetry is a
mode of expression that “feelings” inherently grant to everyone, irrespective of
education or articulacy. Again, the writing takes on a holographic quality: Clare
straddles two opposed positions at once.
‘Pastoral Poesy’ is a meditation on what nature “gives”. The word makes its way
in from the final lines of Wordsworth’s “Ode” (“To me the meanest flower that blows /
Can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” (207-8)), and Clare’s repetitions
pressure its varied significances. To say that a wild flower “gives joy” is to say it grants
an emotion; to say that “‘awthorn blossoms soon as seen / Give may” articulates a
more fundamental transaction, as though the blossoms convey the very essence of the
month. The summer landscape, Clare goes on, ‘Creates a summer in our selves’ (23),
and “to all minds it gives the dower / Of self creating joy” (35-36). Again Clare speaks
of “poesy” as something that “all minds” inherit from nature, but does so in words
which demonstrate the creative influence of art. His language is suffused with
Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode:” “Joy, Lady, is the spirit and the power, / Which
wedding nature to us gives in dower / A new earth and a new Heaven” (67-9; Keach,
17
ed.). The allusion typifies the way Clare’s borrowings refuse to settle straightforwardly
into his lines of argument: for Coleridge, “Joy” deepens our relationship with nature;
for Clare, a spontaneous, self-perpetuating creative joy is the product of that
relationship.
Subsequent stanzas explore the workings of this creative spirit. Clare pursues
mazy lines of thought. He starts from the position that poetry emerges through
attentive listening to a natural eloquence that transcends human speech:
And whether it be hill or moor
I feel where’er I go
A silence that discourses more
Than any tongue can do
Unruffled quietness hath made
A peace in every place
And woods are resting in their shade
Of social loneliness
(37-44)
This is the first appeal to personal experience in the poem, and even as it insists on
poetry’s democratic force, it moves Clare to question whether such sensitivity might
not set him apart from others: the notion of “social loneliness” grasps the irony that
deepened “society” with nature necessitates increased isolation. Wordsworth wrote in
Michael of how “in his Shepherd’s calling [Michael] was prompt / And watchful more
18
than ordinary men” (46-7). Clare explores whether still further distinctions might be
made between the “shepherd” and the “poet:”
The storm from which the shepherd turns
To pull his beaver down
While he upon the heath sojourns
Which autumn bleaches brown
Is music aye and more indeed
To those of musing mind
Who through the yellow woods proceed
And listen to the wind
(45-52)
Where the shepherd “turns” from the storm, “those of musing mind” actively “listen”
to it as “music:”
The poet in his fitful glee
And fancy’s many moods
Meets it as some strange melody
And poem of the woods
(52-5)
19
“Oft have I caught, upon a fitful breeze, / Fragments of far-off melodies, / With ear not
coveting the whole,” Wordsworth’s 1824 poem “Written in a Blank Leaf of
Macpherson’s Ossian” begins. Clare recasts these lines to suggest that the poet’s
temperament allows him to “meet” the wind as a “melody / And poem,” a “whole”
rather than just frayed snatches of inspiration. But again, even as Clare argues for
poetry’s origins in the mind’s meeting with nature, it is art that proves his inspiration,
and further dislocated traces of Wordsworth’s phrasing snag in his lines, each in
themselves concerned with the poet’s heightened alertness to nature:
Strange fits of passion have I known:
And I will dare to tell
(“Strange fits of passion” 1-2)
Sole listener, Duddon! to the breeze that played
With thy clear voice, I caught the fitful sound
Wafted o’er sullen moss and craggy mound
(“Sole listener, Duddon!” 1-3)
Clare makes his case that the poet is attuned to nature by listening to Wordsworth.
In the stanzas that follow, Clare elaborates his sense of the role of human
creativity in poetic expression, again drawing on Wordsworth’s Ossian poem for his
images of a “dark storm” (5) and “mountain height” (6). The storm:
sings & whistles in his mind
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& then it talks aloud
While by some leaning tree reclined
He shuns a coming cloud
That sails its bulk against the sun
A mountain in the light
He heeds not for the storm begun
But dallies with delight
& now a harp that flings around
The music of the wind
The poet often hears the sound
When beauty fills the mind
(53-68)
Wordsworth’s Michael lies behind this passage, too; and, even as Clare is talking of
“poets” rather than “shepherds” by now, you can see how he would have been
enamoured by Michael’s articulation of the special sensitivity to nature of one who has
grown up in a landscape:
Hence had he learned the meaning of all winds,
Of blasts of every tone; and, often-times,
When others heeded not, He heard the South
Make subterraneous music, like the noise
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Of Bagpipers on distant Highland hills.
(48-52)
But reading Wordsworth’s lines alongside “Pastoral Poesy” emphasizes how Clare’s
ballad stanza enables disorientating elisions and transitions. In Clare’s lines, after an
initial statement that the poet amplifies the song that “sings & whistles” in his mind,
attention shifts to the image of the “cloud” that transfixes the poet they describe –
argument subsides to imagery. The main thread of the syntax is picked up again at the
start of the third of these stanzas (“& now”); and the sense that “poesy” emerges out of
a fusion of nature and imagination is accentuated by Clare’s deployment of the
Romantic trope of the Eolian harp: his surprising verb “fling” adds a rough vitality to
the harp “caressed” by the “desultory breeze” in Coleridge’s poem (“The Eolian Harp”
14).
Clare cycles restlessly between celebrating nature and the imagination. Having
built to the contention that poetry is a product of special intuition and creativity, the
poem then appears to start over again, sketching a picture that re-affirms Clare’s
original contention that poesy is “everyones employ:”
The morn with safforn stripd and grey
Or blushing to the view
Like summer fields when run away
In weed of crimson hue
Will simple shepherds hearts imbue
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With nature’s poesy
(72-7)
The poem is repeatedly drawn to the insistence that “poesy is not in words,” yet the
writing’s charm lies in its vivacious experimentalism, its criss-crossing of imaginative
stances in an attempt, as Johanne Clare describes it, playing Clare off against
Wordsworth, “to discover new forms of eloquence, a new way of conveying meaning
less clamorous in its assertion of ‘what we are’, more receptive to the influences of
nature ‘as she is’” (Clare (1987) 160). Clare has Wordsworth in mind when he speaks in
the poem’s pre-penultimate stanza of a life lived in tune with nature as the epitome of
“poesys power that gives to all / A cheerful blessedness” (104). The phrasing contracts
“Tintern Abbey”’s “cheerful faith that all which we behold / Is full of blessings” (134-5),
lines which come at a point in Wordsworth’s poem where Wordsworth catches in his
sister’s words “the language of my former heart” (118) that expounds the “wild
ecstasies” (139) of a life more simply at one with nature. Such an attitude chimes with
the hopefulness, if not the countervailing sadness, of Clare’s final two stanzas.
Modulating into an affectingly personal, even prayer-like voice, they make a wish that
the poet himself might again enjoy such a relationship with nature:
So would I my own mind employ
& my own heart impress
That poesys selfs a dwelling joy
Of humble quietness
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So would I for the biding joy
That to such thoughts belong
That I life’s errand may employ
As harmless as a song
(108-15)
The writing acknowledges the difficulty of reconciling a conception of poetry as
“humble quietness” with the impulse to celebrate the “biding joy” of such a way of
living in “song;” it plays off the winning modesty of what it conceives “poesys self” to
be against the poignant implication in the stanza’s repetitions (“So would I… So would
I”) that this might be a “joy” from which Clare, as a poet, is necessarily alienated. In
the first stanza, Clare speaks of a desire to “impress” this sense of what poetry is upon
his own heart, as if to quell an innate ambitiousness; in the second his attitude seems
to have shifted, even turned inside out. Clare’s simplicity is of a sort that makes
accurate paraphrase almost impossible, but one might venture as a reading of that last
stanza something like: “the abiding joy of dwelling quietly in nature brings with it
such ‘thoughts’ that I cannot resist expressing them in song.” The stanzas could then
be seen as sketching a rueful cycle in which the assertion that poetry inheres in a
“quiet” dwelling in nature provokes such joy that it is impossible not to sing about it,
even as that singing overturns the notion of poesy as simply dwelling (a circuitousness
traced neatly by the chiastic pattern of the rhymes (“employ…joy…joy…employ”)). Yet
if Clare hopes that his “song” might be “harmless,” in speaking of it as an “errand” he
keeps an eye on the risk that it might entail an amount of error-strewn “wandering” as
well as a “calling:” a betrayal and an abandonment of nature that are part of the life of
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art. As Jonathan Bate has remarked: “if ‘poesys self’ was really nature, then Clare could
not dwell there. He was a creature of language: though found in the fields, his poetry
existed on the page” (Bate 185). Clare’s “borrowings” from Wordsworth are one
instance of the way the poetry was “found” on the page, too. His response to what he
found there is animated with a spirit of independence as well as admiration.
i
Clare’s fourth line echoes the opening of Wordsworth’s sonnet “Calais, August, 1802”
(“Is it a Reed that’s shaken by the wind”), in which Wordsworth criticises “men of
prostrate mind” (8) who are prone to too easy submission to power – an attitude
appropriate to the temperament of Clare’s sonnet.
ii
Clare cannot have had the poems for long: Gilchrist promised them on the 17th, and
wrote to acknowledge their return on the 31st. Clare presumably read Wordsworth for
most of his career in the copy Wordsworth’s Miscellaneous Poems of 1820 inscribed to
him by his father.
iii
In a similar vein, Clare later speculated of Wordsworth: “I Should imagine he prefers
the mossy seat on the mountains to the closet for study at least his poems woud
lead one to think so” (By Himself 145).
iv
There has been some confusion over the identity of this parody. Mark Storey
suggests that the poem is a song beginning “Reforming men of England support a
kingdoms claim,” apparently signed in manuscript “William – worth” (Letters 222n.).
But as Timothy Webb remarks, there is no reference to this signature in the Oxford
edition to Clare’s poems, and the poem espouses a political philosophy based on “the
superior merits of ancestral soil and cottage economy” which was “scarcely in accord
with the views which Wordsworth had endorsed for some time and with which he had
become commonly identified” (Webb 231). The sonnet in question is a far more
persuasive candidate.
WORKS CITED
Ashbery, John. Other Traditions: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Harvard U.
P., 2000; Bate, Jonathan. John Clare: A Biography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2003; Clare, Johanne. John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance. McGillQueens UP, 1987; Clare, John. By Himself. Ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell.
Carcanet 2002; -----. The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare. Ed.
Margaret Grainger. Clarendon P., 1983; -----. Poems of the Middle Period, 18221837. Ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell, and P. M. S. Dawson 5 vols. Clarendon P,
1996-2003; -----. The Early Poems of John Clare, 1804-1822. Ed. Eric Robinson and
David Powell 1804-1822 2 vols. Clarendon P, 1989; -----. The Later Poems of John
Clare, 1837-1864. Ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell 2 vols. Clarendon P, 1984;
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-----. The Letters of John Clare. Ed. Mark Storey. Clarendon P, 1985; Coleridge, S.
T. Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and
Opinions. Ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton U. P., 1983; -----. The
Complete Poems. Ed. William Keach. Penguin, 1997; O’Neill, Michael. “’Wholly
Incommunicable By Words’: Romantic Expressions of the Inexpressible.”
Wordsworth Circle 31 (2000): 13-20; Storey, Mark, ed. John Clare: The Critical
Heritage. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973; Webb, Timothy. “The Stiff Collar and
the Mysteries of the Human Heart: The Younger Romantics and the Problem of
Lyrical Ballads” in “A Natural Delineation of Human Passions”: The Historic
Moment of Lyrical Ballads. Ed. C. C. Barfoot. Rodopi, 2004; Wordsworth,
William. The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford U. P., 2008.
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