I a HUMDRUM AHA!: JOHN CLARE's MUNDANE SUBLIME by Dana Odwazny Pell a Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Dorothy F. Schm

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A HUMDRUM AHA!: JOHN CLARE’S MUNDANE SUBLIME

Dana Odwazny Pell

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, Florida

August 2012

A HUMDRUM AHA!: JOHN CLARE’Sii MUNDANE SUBLIM

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to share my sincere appreciation and love to my friends, family, and husband for their support throughout this project. Their encouragement kept me writing even when my focus waned. I would also like to express my continued gratitude for my academic springboard, Betsy Cohen. Miles might separate us, but we have come a long way together. In addition, I am indebted to the Florida Atlantic English department faculty, especially Dr. Golden, Dr. Berlatsky, Dr. Adams, and Dr. McGuirk. Each of you has inspired and humbled me.

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ABSTRACT

Author: Dana Odwazny Pell

Title: A Humdrum Aha!: John Clare’s Mundane Sublime

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Don Adams

Degree: Master of Arts

Year: 2012

Following the work of Sara Houghton-Walker and Edward Strickland, this thesis theorizes the “mundane sublime” as encountered in romanticist John Clare’s poetry.

Instead of being oriented upward, as with Longinus’s elevatory sublime, Clare’s mundane sublime brings the subject downward to earth. While the sublime of the

Burkean tradition begins with terror, I claim that the mundane sublime emerges out of love for that which is commonplace. Still revelatory, it may be further characterized by an engagement with ecosystems, eternity, divinity, and nature as a whole. Clare’s style scaffolds images resulting in a profusion of detail that arrests the mind and allows it to reflect on its own position in nature. As Clare’s mundane sublime takes up simple natural objects and posits an ecological interconnectedness, it implies a more environmentally responsible relationship to one’s surroundings, making it increasingly relevant for green studies.

A HUMDRUM AHA!: JOHN CLARE’S MUNDANE SUBLIME

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1

“On which I love to dwell”: Clare’s Nature.……………………………………………..15

“[T]hose comforts we desire”: The Tempest Versus the Sun-Shower.……………….....27

Enclosing Clare’s ecosystem; Anguish in an Economy of Mind.……………...………..39

Conclusion.………………………………………………………………………….…...53

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..59

1. INTRODUCTION

Nature has judged man a creature of no mean or ignoble quality, but, as if she were inviting us to some great gathering, she has called us into life, into the whole universe, there to be spectators of her games and eager competitors; and she therefore from the first breathed into our hearts an unconquerable passion for whatever is great and more divine than ourselves. --Longinus, Peri Hypsous

I like to make the mundane fabulous whenever I can. --Rufus Wainwright

In the last four decades, scholarly interest in John Clare’s life and work has increased greatly. Marginalized as somehow separate from the romantic tradition, his poems had been written off as too simplistic or merely descriptive (Houghton, Todd). As

Eric Robinson writes, “he has long remained the most undervalued of English writers….

Clare’s knowledge of natural life is unparalleled among English poets: Wordsworth was an amateur to him” (7). Romanticists have certainly made strides to accept the mad

“peasant poet” into the canon, prompting more thoughtful analysis of his poetry’s austere clarity, provincial language, and extensive detail of animals and plants. In particular, consideration for Clare’s poetry is important because it contributes to the practice of green literary criticism—to a reading focused on the importance and significance of the environment and environmental concerns. While scholars have hitherto viewed his work as devoid of the natural sublime, evidence of it nevertheless emerges out of his deceptively simple descriptions. Consideration for Clare’s poetry also adds to our understanding of the history of the sublime by drawing our attention to lesser-known

theorists and ideas.

In her review of relevant critical texts, “John Clare and Revaluation” (2005),

Sarah Houghton-Walker not only turns her eye backward recounting the beginning of academic interest in Clare’s biography, but she also looks forward proposing a hitherto untrodden avenue of scholarship: “[an] area which has not been fully explored by criticism (though it has often inspired other artists) . . . is Clare’s knowledge of the discourse of the sublime, and the way in which his verse articulates a sublimity felt in the presence of nature” (17). Recognizing such a gap in the literature, Houghton-Walker fills it with her article “‘Enkindling ecstasy’: The Sublime Vision of John Clare” and her later book John Clare’s Religion. In these two works, she directs our gaze to Clare’s brand of the sublime, which she sees as embedded in Christian values. Consideration for the sublime is integral to reading Clare’s poetry because it sheds light not only on his spiritual beliefs, but also on his use of paradox and language (177). She qualifies her choice of words as she writes, “Clare’s very perception of the world at times partakes of a quasi-sublime experience whose translation into poetry marks some of his best verse”

(“Enkindling” 177; emphasis added). Discerning the ways in which Clare appropriates the concept for his own, Houghton-Walker troubles the definition of the sublime. She shows us how Clare experiences a language-resistant ecstasy at the sight of the minute and ordinary, rather than the immense and terrifying.

I will engage and extend Houghton-Walker’s undertaking in order to demonstrate that Clare’s version of the sublime not only relies upon the ordinary, but that it also evokes a tension between the familiar and the strange. Furthermore, I will situate the sublime as it arises in Clare’s poetry within an ecological framework. Above all,

Houghton-Walker’s analysis paves the way for this undertaking to advance what I call the “mundane sublime.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines the “mundane” as

“[b]elonging to the earthly world, as contrasted with heaven; worldly, earthly,” commonplace, and boring. Given these denotations, the mundane sublime might seem like a contradiction in terms. Still, it is an extension of the romantic project set forth by Samuel

Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads—to open poetry to the commoner, to utilize pedestrian speech in a poetic manner. I contend that, for the most part, Clare’s collection of poetry represents a redistribution of value. It values the undervalued and the overlooked; it values the small. Certainly, Clare’s poems that depict roosters or mice function differently than do “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” or “Lines

Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abby.” Watching rain fall into a puddle is not the same as peering over a cliff at an expansive, tumultuous ocean, albeit the experience may be classified or characterized as the mundane sublime because it too inspires awe. For

Clare, a mole-hill is as impressive as a mountain. Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine how his descriptions of all too familiar objects might be overshadowed in comparison to those that are new, unexpected, and more grandiose.

Previous to Houghton-Walker’s efforts, the only other work to reflect on any kind of sublimity in Clare’s aesthetic was Edward Strickland’s “Clare and the Sublime”

(1987). In his essay, Strickland confesses his surprise over the apparent lack of sublime elements in Clare’s body of work. Compiling an inventory of poetic moments, he notes the “virtual absence” of “the naturalistic as well as preternatural sublime—until we confront those few late visionary poems” (142). Moreover, he claims that Clare purposefully evades that terror which is integral to the traditional sublime because of “his

psychological constitution and timidity” (143). This comment displays a twofold critical tendency. The first is to label Clare’s pre-asylum poetry as unphilosophical or unemotional. The second is to strictly define the sublime according to those standards authored and perpetuated by the “accepted” romantic poets and by particular critics.

These figures include individuals like John Dennis, Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke,

Immanuel Kant, and its earliest originator, Longinus.

In the discipline’s foundational text, Peri Hypsous, Longinus1 writes of superlative rhetoric that is sublime because it is exemplary, enduring, forceful, and inspiring: “the true sublime naturally elevates us: uplifted with a sense of proud exaltation, we are filled with joy and pride” (179). Sublime speech or writing transports us with an overwhelming power attributed to eloquence and directness. Ranging from form and diction to a work’s thematic content, Longinus methodically breaks down the elements of sublime oratory or writing into five main groupings: “grand conceptions,”

“vehement emotion,” “figures of thought and figures of speech,” and “nobility of language” (181). Even though he lays out his treatise as a lesson in ars poetica, the production of the sublime—that ability to move the audience beyond themselves—relies upon what is described as a mysterious divine or daemonic possession of the author or speaker. At its inception, then, the definition of the sublime is slippery. The sublime experience eludes language, and it is perhaps for this reason that so many individuals in the wake of Longinus tried to pin down its meaning in a range of nuanced and sometimes contradictory definitions.

After 1674, when Despréaux Boileau translated Peri Hypsous into French,

1 The exact author of the text is unknown, but it is most often ascribed to Dionysius Longinus. 4

consideration for the subject came into vogue among the British literati. If not ushering in considerations for the experience, travel writing and the picturesque coincided with its reception. At this time, questions regarding subjectivity and taste, genius and craft, education and class were brought to the fore anew. Among English intellectuals, the sublime was psychologized as an experience one could have not only by writing, listening, or reading, but also through a face-to-face encounter with nature. The discourse of the sublime sparked a shift in popular culture as individuals reassessed passion through the “natural sublime” (Shaw, Nicolson). While excessive political or religious fervor had been shunned and repressed because of its dangerous ability to inspire upheaval in a particularly uneasy political atmosphere, the sublime safely directed enthusiasm toward nature, toward panoramic scenes. Even though scholars of the period widely disagreed on many particulars concerning the sublime and the beautiful, they each furthered the idea that it is a climactic intellectual experience and the paramount of artistic composition.

Despite lingering questions over its location—in nature, in an idea, or in great writing— the sublime was generally and conventionally thought of as an aesthetic encounter in which one turns the mind toward a point beyond the grasp of language.

In his seminal work, The Sublime, Samuel Monk conceives of the sublime as a category of aesthetics that allowed the English of the eighteenth century to appreciate extraordinary phenomena that lacked beauty by neo-classical standards. In other words, it provided a vocabulary for young, wealthy, educated males to share and embellish their journeys to the Alps after embarking on their tours of Europe, as was the trend at the time. While they travelled, men like John Dennis and Joseph Addison encountered natural scenes that did not behave according to proper harmony, balance, and proportion.

Specifically in his Spectator essay, Addison portrays sublime landscapes as raw and untamed:

Such are the Prospects of an open Champian Country, a vast uncultivated

Desart, of huge Heaps of Mountains, high Rocks and Precipices, or a wide

Expanse of Waters, where we are not struck with the Novelty or Beauty of

the Sight, but with that rude kind of Magnificence which appears in many

of these stupendous Works of Nature. (qtd. in Shaw 35)

Described as “vast” and expansive, this scene is seemingly endless. The scene is sublime precisely because it approaches or gestures to something primordial, infinite, and eternal.

In opposition to Clare’s preference for the mundane, typical sublime scenes or objects possess grandeur, magnificence, silence, excessive loudness, obscurity and uncertainty, vacuity, solitude, unpredictability, and freedom (Burke). These vistas are so overwhelming that they are difficult to put into language. For example, Dennis turns to paradox when positive terms fall short of adequately describing his orgasmic experience of the Alps: “The sense of all this produc’s different motions in me, viz., a delightful

Horrour, a terrible Joy, and at the same time, that I was infinitely pleas’d, I trembled”

(277 qtd. in Nicolson). Like for Kant, the vision of the Alps for Dennis is so great and new that it fills the mind with a mixture of pleasurable pain and painful pleasure. It momentarily arrests thought only to arouse contemplation on the limits of human language, knowledge, reason, and imagination. It is as if the mind ascends to the mountain’s peak, and from a height higher still looks down with pride at the accomplishment, the head swimming in vertigo.

Unlike Dennis and Addison though, John Clare had no grand tour in which he

could encounter mountains scraping the sky or rough oceans seeming to boil. While he was well read, he lacked a formal education and his family was famously poor.

Therefore—except for those scenes described in some of his favorite poetry, as in James

Thomson’s “The Seasons”—Clare’s real life experience with nature excluded many of those exotic vistas suited to the discourse of the sublime. As Angus Fletcher writes of

Clare, “There is no grand, egotistically sublime Wordsworthian vision, no prophetic announcement up to which, on more than one occasion, the poem might portentously advance with alpine steps (60). The gray and muted tones of the English countryside that appear in Clare’s poetry are not obscure and mysterious, as exhibited in the Burkean sublime. The poet focuses his attention not on great mountains, but instead on those small, common birds and flowers that he encounters on a daily basis. These mundane objects astonish him. He grants the commonplace and the minute sublimity not only because there is an infinite number of infinitely small things, but also because each of these natural phenomena participates in a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts.

For Clare, these mundane objects exist within a cohesive design, and for us they recall lesser-known ideas about the sublime.

Leaving aside the traditional conceptions of the aesthetic, theorists like John

Baillie and Lord Shaftesbury contend that ecstasy and awe may arise from different kinds of natural objects. Lord Shaftesbury held a neoplatonic-Christian perspective in which

Nature is sublime because it is constructed, or designed, as a divine system. Regular objects can bring about a sublime moment in the observer because they are made by and connected to God. Moreover, Baillie writes, “some ‘objects…{that} are not great and immense, if long connected with such, will often produce an Exaltedness of Mind’ (35)”

(qtd. in Shaw 43). According to Baillie, linguistic correlation and poetry may induce the sublime regardless of the object described: “Once animated by the combinatory or associative power of language, a power undetermined by God, mind, or nature, a mouse as much as a mountain may become a source of the sublime” (qtd. in Shaw 45). Through trope or through divine association, great writing raises mundane objects to the level of the sublime. This notion defies Burke’s strict distinction between the Sublime and

Beautiful. For him, only certain very particular objects can inspire the terror necessary for bringing about the sublime experience.

In A Philosophical Enquiry into our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke’s thesis rests on the supposition that fear and pain are stronger psychological forces than pleasure or love, and thus better able to elevate the subject to higher intellectual pursuits.

Correspondingly, a confrontation with mortality—a suggested threat to one’s life found when looking at an oncoming storm, a large mountain range, or a violently erupting volcano—is a hallmark of romantic poetry from Wordsworth to Shelley and Keats. In the contemporary debate on the sublime, those who stress the aesthetic power of the raw and the magnificently large, like Burke and Kant, overshadow those who make room for minutia. Set against these poets, Clare stands out. While there is profound loss in his work, he seems never to be afraid of an environmental threat. Both Houghton-Walker and

Strickland note the marked absence of terror in Clare’s work. When we read his poems, we find that love for the mundane phenomena in his Helpston2 home abounds. It is a force that unites and reassures. For Clare, love is the sublimely affective emotion that coincides with awe and ecstasy, with the mind’s pleasurable pain.

2 Clare spells the name of his home village as both “Helpston” and “Helptone.” 8

While Clare’s body of work does indeed lack those obviously emotive images like a turbulent ocean or an immense, exotic pyramid, I argue that his poems, even his pre- asylum poems, are not without that curious mixture of attraction and repulsion that is constitutive of the sublime. Specifically, Kant poetically writes of the sublime moment:

the mind feels agitated….compared with a vibration, i.e., with a rapid

alternation of repulsion from, and attraction to, one and the same object. If

a [thing] is excessive for the imagination (and the imagination is driven to

[such excess] as it apprehends [the thing] in intuition), then [the thing is,

as it were, an abyss in which the imagination is afraid to lose itself]”

(Critique of Judgment 115)

This tension between reactionary emotions is particularly important because it is what distinguishes Clare’s mundane sublime as sublime, rather than merely epiphanic. Even though Clare’s mundane sublime may be seen as having parallels and similarities to the

“Moment,” as described in M.H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism Tradition and

Revolution in Romantic Literature, it is more than a moment. In his work, Abrams explains that “Many Romantic writers testified to a deeply significant experience in which an instant of consciousness, or else an ordinary object or event, suddenly blazes into revelation; the unsustainable moment seems to arrest what is passing, and is often described as an intersection of eternity with time” (385). Clare’s mundane sublime does this, but it also brings about a tension, or agitation, between familiarity and strangeness, parts and wholes, home and alienation or exile.

Clare himself establishes an obvious preference for the mundane when he chooses to describe “plain and simpler things” (70) as sublime in “The Flitting”:

Some sing the pomps of chivalry

As legends of the ancient time

Where gold and pearls and my[s]tery

Are shadows painted for sublime

But passions of sublimity

Belong to plain and simpler things

And David underneath a tree

Sought when a shepherd Salems springs (65-72)3

Certainly, Clare’s engagement with the sublime “does not depend on vast physical magnitude; it is just as likely to be the result of encountering the microscopic: its essential aspect is awe” (“Religion” 133). With the mind’s eye trained upon the great heights of imposing mountains, Strickland and other critics miss what Clare has no difficulty seeing—that is, the majesty of the tiny insect directly underfoot, the

“passions”(9) in “plain and simpler things”(10). Only once we alter our perspective on the sublime by broadening its parameters can we begin to see how Clare consciously subverts the traditional aesthetic.

In another rare moment in which Clare chooses to use the word sublime, his diction reveals his philosophical vision of nature. “The Eternity of Nature” explicitly demonstrates how a mundane object can condition the mind to think on the infinite, on renewal and return. In the poem, one who looks at a daisy might think of all the instances in which a child had stooped down to pick it up. They might even think of the daisy

3 Unless otherwise specified, I have obtained all of John Clare’s poetry and prose from the Oxford World’s Classics edition: John Clare Major Works, edited with an introduction and notes by Eric Robinson and David Powell. 10

growing and “smiling” (24) at Eve in Eden. For Clare, the sight of a single daisy is a wonder:

Leaves from eternity are simple things

To the worlds gaze where to a spirit clings

Sublime and lasting—trampled underfoot

The daisy lives and strikes its little root

Into the lap of time—

Not only is the daisy a remainder of unspoiled Eden, but it is also a synecdoche. The little flower is sublime because it is a part and representative of divinity, eternity, and Nature.

Here, Clare elides flowers, more specifically a daisy, with poetry, with his poem. The leaf or page of a book and the green leaf of a flower both extend beyond themselves into a time beyond their time.

Here also, he contrasts particulars with universals. While an individual child, plant, bee, or robin might die and exist no more, each is a unique manifestation of a mysterious pattern. The narrator comments on one’s participation in time when he contrasts a poet’s song with a robin’s:

The little Robin in the quiet glen

Hidden from fame and all the strife of men

Sings unto time a pastoral and gives

A music that lives on and ever lives

Both spring and autumn years rich bloom and fade

Longer then [sic] songs that poets ever made (43-8).

Not dissimilar from a mathematical fractal, the song of the poet is a copy of the robin’s

song. As with one’s proximity to the lodestone in Plato’s Ion, the poet is farthest away from the primordial song that the robin sings. Clare further shows this platonic metaphysics when he enumerates the eleven instances of the number five: “Five spots appear which time ne’er wears away” (80), “Five leaves of paler hue goes streaking up”

(84), “And birds a many keep the rule alive / And lay five eggs nor more nor less then five” (85-6).

We may find a similar typology in book VI of Wordsworth’s “Prelude”:

…The immeasurable height

Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,

The stationary blasts of waterfalls,

And in the narrow rent at every turn

Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,

The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,

The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,

Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side

As if a voice were in them, the sick sight

And giddy prospect of the raving stream,

………………………………………….

Were all like workings of one mind, the features

Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;

Characters of the great Apocalypse,

The types and symbols of Eternity, (624-39)

Each of the objects which Wordsworth describes—the woods, waterfalls, winds, torrents,

and rocks—are pieces of a larger whole, of eternity. In this way, they are parallel to my vision of a mundane sublime that is ecological. However, these natural phenomena are not mundane. They are “immeasurable” (624), “never to be decayed” (625), “bewildered and forlorn” (628), “shooting” (629) and “drizzling” (630). They make a “sick sight”

(631). Contrarily, Clare’s poetic descriptions require a revised vision of the sublime that recognizes, or perhaps more appropriately that ignores, the disparity between a simple daisy and great objects like a “raving stream” (631).

Fletcher observes that “Clare has his own subtle Presocratic version of the hidden meaning of nature, which is perfectly hidden on the surface, like a quail resting on a bed of grayish grass and twigs” (60). The presence of the sublime in Clare’s poetry seems to hide in plain sight: “what we simply see, in all its immediacy…its mere being is a wonder of nature” (60). Indeed, it hides directly on the surface of Nature. In the following chapter of this thesis, Chapter 2: “‘On which I love to dwell’: Clare’s Nature,” I will explore

Clare’s unique conception of nature in greater detail. Clare’s view of, love for, and interaction with his natural surroundings are of vital importance as they are the basis for the mundane sublime. Even though he makes mention of images that he probably never saw, loving the great and small equally and describing all seasons and weather, his nature was primarily one of the undramatic, traditionally un-sublime variety: “far more commonplace, mundane even” (Houghton-Walker “Enkindling” 180).

In Chapter 3, “‘Those comforts we desire’: The tempest versus the sun-shower,” I take on the image of the storm. The violent storm or hurricane is a recognizable image of the sublime, but Clare’s treatment of storms does not conform to the traditional model.

Even when Clare describes violent weather, he seems to place greater significance

elsewhere: on a Pooty shell rather than a torrent. It is the shell that inspires awe, rather than the hurricane. His storm imagery frames tiny objects with a view to cycles or the process of renewal, and in this way, they figure the mundane sublime.

In Chapter 4, “Enclosing Clare’s Ecosystem; Anguish in an Economy of Mind,” I reflect on Clare’s experience of enclosure as it underscores the mundane sublime. In comparison to what should be a terrifying storm, human violence to the Helpston ecosystem is much more frightening. Drawing lines across the ecological system and causing fragmentation and separation, enclosure shines an unflattering light on the human, and it makes us question our responsibility to nature. Consideration for Clare’s poems that feature enclosure highlights the curious tension inherent to the mundane sublime: the reverberation between domesticity and alienation, knowing and doubt.

I will conclude this analysis by considering John Ashbery’s dedication poem,

“For John Clare.” Looking at Ashbery’s poem not only makes us consider the mundane sublime in more modern incarnations, such as in Gerard Manly Hopkins and Annie

Dillards’ work. It also demonstrates how Clare’s poetry communicates a special ontology in nature. That is, Clare’s mundane sublime necessitates a heightened temporal and spacial awareness. As John Ashbery said in his published lecture series Other Traditions, to read John Clare is to “get down in the grass” (13), to “re-insert [one] into the present, of re-establishing ‘now’” (19).

2. “ON WHICH I LOVE TO DWELL”4: CLARE’S NATURE

Nature for the most part knows no law, yet it is not the way of Nature to work at random and wholly without system. In all production Nature is the first and primary element; but all matter of degree, of the happy moment in each case, and again of the safest rules of practice and use, are adequately provided and contributed by system. --Longinus, Peri Hypsous

Let us go in the fields love and see the green tree Let’s go in the meadows and hear the wild bee There’s plenty of pleasure for you love and me --John Clare, “The Invitation”

While the original notion of the sublime comes out of a debate concerning what is truly great specifically in writing and rhetoric, the passages determined to be superior were oftentimes those depicting unrestrained nature. “Nature…seems inextricably woven into the fabric of the sublime” (605), asserts Christopher Hitt. In questioning eco-critics’ general neglect of the aesthetic category, Hitt recalls that both Burke and Kant describe the sublime experience as a “disorienting or overwhelming confrontation with a natural object” (605). Indeed, it is always some terrestrial, meteorological, celestial, or animal source that elevates the subject and inspires contemplation of epiphenomenal matters.

Similarly, it is most often the representation of these same phenomena that transmits the sublime to the reader or viewer. Given this co-dependent relationship between the sublime and the natural world, it is strange that contemporary ecocritics—except perhaps for Hitt, Steven Rosendale, Aaron Dunckel, and Lee Rozelle—have not peered through

4 From “Boys and Spring:” “There’s something yet in childhood wars / On which I love to dwell” (21-2). 15

this critical lens more closely to gain new understandings on issues of environmentalism, deep ecology, and green cultural studies.

It would be stranger still if my own examination of John Clare’s mundane sublime did not pause over the poet’s perception of the material world. Because ideas about and descriptions of Nature ground the multivocal discourse of the sublime, and because the “mundane” is that which we normally take for granted, it is only fitting to begin by looking into how Clare looks at the flora and fauna that appear and reappear in his poetry. Clare’s conception of nature is decidedly unique, and surprisingly modern.

His relationship to his surroundings is one bound up with spiritual beliefs, identity, the local, and home (Barrell). Simply put, it is multiform and variegated.

On one level, Clare’s earth is a vestige of Biblical Eden, always pure and likened to the innocence and naivete of childhood. In his work on Clare’s willingness to envision nature and women as divine, Greg Crossan observes, “even the most humble of sights may be described as ‘half divine’ (SC, 113). The grandeur and mystery of the lofty stars

‘speak a Diety’ (PJC, I, 237), while the simplicity and familiarity of the pastoral plains evince ‘A power divine’ (PJC, II, 261)” (168). Both the great and the small in nature rest on the altar of Clare’s religion. His poetry is a testament to his worship of trees, flowers, and shrubs. Still, at the same time that nature satisfies a spiritual need, it also serves a psychological purpose.

The specific composition and topography of the Helpston area affects Clare’s mental health. Later in life, he found not only a literary muse in his time out of doors, but also stability and reprieve from the two different asylums where he was institutionalized.

Nothing served so well to renew and anchor him in place, as did the idea and matter of

Nature. In this way, Clare’s relationship to his home environment may be further characterized by his persistent preference for using the “vulgar” common and local names for animals and plants over their Latin names (Vardy 60). Clare detested science’s tendency to dissect. While he may have written natural histories of the Helpston area, he positioned himself in opposition to the strict, cold work of scientists. For him, utilizing the common or mundane names evokes an acquaintanceship and an intimacy with all of the creatures, plants, rocks, farmers, and children that he encountered on his walks.

Along with many others, John Middleton Murry, Eric Robinson, and James

McKusick all recognize this joy. They do not tie this element of Clare’s poetry to any kind of sublime formulation, but they do stress it in relation to the singularity and authenticity of Clare’s green writing. Specifically, McKusick emphasizes Clare’s ecopoetic in which “the individual organism is not regarded as valuable for its economic or aesthetic qualities considered in isolation, but for its participation in a larger community” (82). As an ecosystem, the environment in which Clare found himself immersed is a web of interconnected and interdependent life, one that he described in photographic detail. Not only did Clare see this ecosystem with clarity, but he also envisioned it with child-like eyes. That is, his poetic voice captures the wonder with which he viewed those plants and birds glimpsed thousands of times before, as if they were new and unexpected. Above all, nature for Clare is joy. Given this joyful ecological awareness, Clare achieves what Aldo Leopold would characterize as “an ethical relation to land [which cannot] exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for value….something far broader than mere economic value” (“The Land Ethic”

31). As I wrote in the introduction, I see the mundane sublime emerging out of Clare’s

work as a strategic revaluation of ordinary natural phenomena that is normally overlooked as unimportant. Clare’s view of nature figures an ecosystem or a bio-pyramid in which all things exist in cooperation, in which the very small and the undervalued gain significance through their relation to a larger web of associations.

McKusick writes that this kind of green writing is “[V]irtually unprecedented in the English-speaking world” (82), because Clare translates the experience of being in nature through a “mode of presentation that elides chronological difference[, enabling] his deep insight into the interdependence of all living things” (82). Clare’s poetry equalizes humans and animals that would normally exist in a hierarchy, in a chain of being, by seeming to collapse time. According to McKusick, when Clare looks at nature, he sees everything all at once in an ecosystem full of species living in cooperation, or symbiosis.

This interconnectedness may be exhibited in Clare’s style just as much as his poetry’s content. For example, “Winter Evening” demonstrates a distinctive fast-paced illustrative narrative. Clare delivers descriptions of animals and plants in quick succession:

The crib stock fothered—horses suppered up

And cows in sheds all littered down in straw

The threshers gone the owls are left to whoop

The ducks go waddling with distended craw

Through little hole made in the henroost door

And geese with idle gabble never oer

Bate careless hog until he tumbles down (1-7)

In this passage, the absence of any punctuation, save for a dash, and the alteration in focus from one animal to the next combine to create the impression of speed. We are introduced to a new animal one after the next—horses, cows, threshers, owls, ducks, geese, and a hog. The animals are joined in succession within the collective aerial perspective of the “fowl high perched” (9) watching the scene below. In the last two lines, the poem closes by moving in opposing directions. The crows and jackdaws head one way “to the warm woods behind the village” (13), and the boys walk in the other

“whistling home for bed” (14). These details create a subtle tension between the sky and the ground, the village and the woods, home and away. While the poem ends at home, and thus each detail is brought home for us, it also contains a certain uneasiness. Each animal is situated within a larger whole: the whole of the poem that is a “Winter

Evening,” a time of one late day and sunset, and a chain of animals interacting with one another. Unified even more by the reader’s roaming gaze, we encounter the ecosystem in a poetic onslaught that leaves us feeling both at home, and also unexpectedly uncomfortable.

Observing the same effect of style, Timothy Brownlow characterizes Clare’s nature as excessive and frenetic. It is precisely here in the excessive nature of things where I pinpoint the traditional sublime and the beginnings of the mundane sublime.

Specifically, Brownlow suggests that Clare’s conception of nature does violence to poetry and perception: “Nature seems to be in constant motion, flitting past the poet's eye in such kinetic profusion that it threatens to break up the comfortable pictorial framework and the correspondingly strict verse-forms. It is all too much for the eye to take in” (56).

Brownlow characterizes nature as seen through Clare’s poetic eye as an overwhelming

force. Strikingly, this power behaves according to the conventions of the traditional sublime. Beginning with a natural scene that evokes the human rationalization of infinity, it halts reason and puts a stutter in language, if not stopping it altogether. Just as in

“Winter Evening,” the reader encounters a multifaceted ecosystem, almost too full of life.

The onlooker cannot get a grasp on it. Notwithstanding this similarity, the example cannot evoke the traditional sublime because the subject matter is not terrifying or imposing in any way. Instead, it is the small details in the midst of infinity and eternity that give way to awe, rather than some life threatening storm or animal. In Clare’s mundane sublime, then, quotidian scenes remind us of ecosystems, and instead of terror, one feels a pleasurable angst at loving and existing within such a system.

“[O]ne of the most important facets of this ‘sublime’, and one which remains to be explored more fully, is the intensity of love Clare expresses through its vocabulary and phraseology” (“Enkindling” 17), explains Houghton-Walker. Love is integral not only to our thinking through the mundane sublime, but it is also central to Clare’s conception of nature. Furthermore, “[b]ecause Clare perceives the natural world to have a sublime aspect, his love has no limits” (Religion 182). There is a circular movement at work here in which Clare not only loves nature because it is sublime, but nature is sublime because

Clare loves it. In contrast to the traditionally conceived sublime, which rests on terror as the generative emotion, it is love that elevates Clare to greater heights. Paradoxically, however, those greater heights are oriented downward—down in the dirt where one may feel an ecological interconnectedness. Not surprisingly, what Clare loves is often time something boring, small, delicate, and/or overlooked. In his discussion of the poet’s divinization of nature, Crossan writes:

Clare the dedicated botanist, the faithful recorder of fact, can lift the

commonplace into the divine through the intensity of his love. The

mundane sights and sounds of Helpstone become

…strange landscapes of delight and joy,

Beauty’s delightful places, where the eye

Sees things more fair than earth hath ever known” (55)

In one of his songs from the Helpston period, Clare describes his optics: “eyes like to mine that is blinded wi love” (47 l-2). The poet’s vision, as contrasted with that of the clown—a recurrent figure in his work—is seemingly covered by a film. This film is love, but it does not obscure his vision so much as it amplifies it. Love permits him to see, appreciate, and respect what others do not; it allows him to admire animals and plants typically perceived as unworthy of one’s prolonged attention. In “[On Taste],”

Clare sets up an extended metaphor in which the clown sees “Pages of landscape tree and flower and brook / Like bare blank leaves he turns unheeded bye” (13-4). The poet, on the other hand, sees nature through love, and as we are told at the beginning of the poem, as a book. In fact, we are told in “Second Address to the Rose Bud in Humble Life” that the “poets humble duty” is “to see and wish thee well” (35-6). While the clown corrupts, destroys, and cuts down, it is the job of the poet to see with love and to be a protector, well-wisher, and immortalizer.

As such a poet, Clare’s amorous feelings toward nature are so prevalent that the phrase “I love” appears approximately 50 times in the collection of his major works. He seems always to be professing his love in song or sonnet declaring, “I love…” to walk, or glimpse, or see. In Murry’s assessment, then, “[w]e may therefore most truly describe

Clare as the love poet of nature” (qtd. in Coupe 42). “Nature,” he continues, “was Clare’s mistress; her he served and cherished with a tenderness and faithful knowledge” (43). He does not necessarily configure nature as a kind of female paramour, but many of Clare’s poems include pastoral love, suggested intimate encounters in open fields, and the longing for Clare’s first beloved, Mary Joyce—who died in a fire.

For Clare, nature elicits love; it is to be loved, and it is an environment in which to love. Nevertheless, this love is no simple thing, especially given the loss of Mary.

Clare sometimes presents love as an unsettling and complicated mixture of emotions because love gets lost. In “Love’s Pains” specifically, love reenacts a tension:

This love, I canna’ bear it,

It cheats me night and day;

This love, I canna’ wear it,

It takes my peace away (1-4)

In these lines, we see a love in distress because it betrays. In the second stanza, it is first a

“flower” (5), and then a “thorn” (6). Even though the speaker “tried to throw away the bud” (15), “the blossom would remain” (16). While this poem is ambiguous and veiled, it provides a glimpse into the complexity of love for Clare, as it is bound up with mourning and nature. He loves despite, or perhaps in spite of “Love’s Pains.”

Even though we can easily construe nature as Clare’s mistress, and he did sometimes personify or humanize streams, trees, and nonhuman animals, Clare, more than other poets in the romantic period, approached nature from a distance with enough respect to allow it’s proper “privacy” that something so radically other demands. As Ben

Hickman notes, poets following in the tradition of Thomson “are always mapping an

observed scene onto an ideal one, seeking a ‘correct’ composition. For Clare, on the other hand, as Barrell points out, ‘pleasure is not in the design, and the active control over the landscape, but in the multiplicity and the particularity of images in the landscape, which he cannot control and before which he is passive” (Hickman 61). In other words, Clare’s love of nature does not color his vision, making it more idealized, nor does it permit him dominance. Clare’s vision of nature puts him at the same level as nature creating a sympathy. Murry echoes this sentiment when he writes, “The spiked thistle, the firetail, the hare, the whitenosed and the grandfather bee were [Clare’s] friends. Yet he hardly humanised them; he seems rather to have lived on the same level of existence as they, and to have known them as they know each other” (Coupe 42). Crossan writes, “he has largely discarded the structural unity which depends on the elevated position of the poet who stands as master of all he surveys, casting his eye over the landscape’s horizontal bands, meditating on moors and mountains, manners and morals, drawing all things in to his synthesizing perspective” (Crossan 3). Instead, Clare’s eye takes in the mundane along with the great, and it does so without exaggeration or distorting the object.

Even though he is capable of inserting linguistic flourishes, metaphors, and allegory in the style of other romantic poets, much of Clare’s work resists metaphorizing, and therefore it resists assimilating or encroaching upon the strange in nature. According to Strickland, “Clare’s nature—at least when he is at his best—is neither an abstraction nor a pretext for meditation or mythology; it is visible, palpable, and one cannot imagine

Clare, a day-laborer in the fields, clutching at walls like the youthful idealist Wordsworth to assure himself of their existence” (142). For example, in “The Mouse’s Nest” (263),

Clare’s narrator confronts a female mouse: “She looked so odd and so grotesque to me / I

ran and wondered what the thing could be” (7-8). In this poem—a revisiting of Robert

Burns’s “To a mouse”—the speaker is struck by the oddity of an ordinary mouse, so much so that he retreats. Here, Clare perceives a natural figure to be at once strange and familiar. Strange and familiar are not mutually exclusive terms in his poetics. At the end, the poem closes with a unexpected couplet: “The water oer the pebbles scarce could run /

And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun” (13-4). It is as if the strangeness of the mouse permeates the whole scene making the cesspools somehow beautiful and magical.

Indeed, Clare often includes magical elements to underscore the strange quality of an animal or a scene.

“Some twenty poems show a sudden delight in changing from botanical observation to ‘fairy phantasies,’” Crossan explains. “[T]he fairy metaphor is just one of the many that Clare uses to express the enchanting animation of the natural world” (53).

After moving just a handful of miles from his home, Clare writes “The Flitting” in which he remarks on the utter strangeness of his new environment: “those pinky heads / Like fairy pins amid the flowers” (143-44). Moreover, in one of his more traditionally sublime poems, Clare again invokes fairies:

While fairy visions intervene

Creating dread surprise

From distant objects dimly seen

That catch the doubtful eyes

And Fairy’s now (no doubt) unseen

In silent revel sups

With dew drops bumpers toast their queen

From crowflowers golden cups (61-8)

Specifically, Clare’s invocation of fairies can be seen not only as a romantic convention and a vestige of folkloric traditions, but also as embodying the tendency to view the familiar as special. Indeed, natural phenomena are wonderfully and radically novel because, despite their apparent familiarity, each is exceptional and all participate in something larger, in eternity.

A comparison between Keats’s ode “To Autumn” and one of Clare’s several autumn poems exemplifies the disparity in poetic strategies of description. The two poems share the same three stanza organization along with some of the same words:

“stubble” and “mourn.” Each poem seems to be a structural and meaningful inversion of the other, as Clare picks up where Keats leaves off in his last stanza. In Clare’s hands,

“barred clouds bloom the soft dying day” (“To Autumn” 25) becomes “The autumn day it fades away” (“Autumn” 1). In contrast to the multiple connotations evoked by Keats’s few words, Clare’s line seems rather austere. By blushing pink to display a sunset,

Keats’s strange clouds signal night and the beginning of the end of the season. As if embarrassed by late summer’s excessive ripeness, the clouds “touch the stubble-plains with a rosy hue” (26). Here, “barred” may indicate some streaked quality, or serve to remind us of the measures of a musical piece; the sky’s personified cheeks may either be flushed from post-coital activities found in stanza one, or else flushed with fever as winter and death approach. On the other hand, “The autumn day it fades away” (1) lacks the surfeit of signification that Keats’s line possesses. Without any additional modifiers,

Clare’s line is lucid. By virtue of Clare’s uncomplicated style, however, the depiction seems less anthropomorphic, and more akin to the very nature that he describes. Without

the imposition of further semantic value, or personal implications, the poem modestly exhibits time pressing forward. Fall slowly turns to winter.

In this way, Clare’s view of nature and his style of writing share a fundamental minimalism. In an 1827 letter to Henry Behnes concerning some biblical passages, Clare, like Longinus, suggests that sublimity lies in simplicity (HW “Religion” 142).

Furthermore, at the outset of his poetic career, Clare’s personal correspondence records his publisher, John Taylor, prompting him to engage the sublime and reflect upon nature with more sentiment (Houghton-Walker “Enkindling” 178-9). With a decidedly antagonistic attitude, Clare himself describes the contemporary poetry of the sublime as

“bombastic fancy” (Storey Letters 541) with “bomb bursting images tagged together by big sounding words” (539). Clare rejects the rhetoric. He takes issue with the purposefully affective and hyperbolic. Because his portrayal of nature maintains a photographic quality—and a perceived authenticity—it makes sense that Clare would dismiss exaggerations. The mundane sublime, then, can be seen as an organic result of

Clare’s view of nature.

3. “THOSE COMFORTS WE DESIRE”5: THE TEMPEST VERSUS THE SUN-SHOWER

With a great storm, when the swelling waves rise in mountains to the skies, and the black clouds thicken from all quarters of the heavens, there is always joined the apprehension of danger, which puts the passions into a hurry… --John Baillie, An essay on the sublime

During the sublime’s theoretical infancy, Longinus described the force of the orator as a lightning strike, an element part and parcel of a substantial storm. The sublime takes hold of both the writer/speaker and the audience in a flash with enormous energy.

Similarly, the early German Romantics, or proto-romantics, likened emotional excess to a storm by calling their movement the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress). As a reaction to the Enlightenment, these thinkers encouraged the expression of emotional extremes and subjectivity as a more accurate representation of the human experience. Evocative of emotional catharsis, disorder, destruction, revolution, generation, and renewal, the storm appeals to the Romantic sensibility.

As a symbol, a device to create a dark and gloomy setting, and a natural phenomenon to be experienced and feared, a storm stirs the earth into a frenzy and “puts the passions into a hurry” (Baillie). In the second canto of Lord Byron’s Don Juan, for example, the narrator portrays the storm that wracks Don Juan’s ship as possessing power beyond language:

The wind blew fresh again: as it grew late

5 From “The Shepherds Calendar.” 27

A squall came on, and while some guns broke loose,

A gust—which all descriptive power transcends—

Laid with one blast the ship on her beam ends. (XXX 8)

This gust destroys decisively in a single blow. While Byron may be presenting the storm in a satirical manner, with more tongue in cheek than serious fright, the passage still depicts terror without hope for reprieve. Capable of dashing sailors upon rocks and felling trees, a furious hurricane or cyclone conveys the indiscriminate power of nature— or at least it should.

In contrast with Byron’s storm and other dramatic torrents of the time, Clare’s tempests seem to be domesticated. On the whole, they are less frightening and less threatening than the one Don Juan encounters on his journey out of Spain. Clare’s poetic storms range from showers to downpours which turn cottages into boats and make entire swaths of forest surge like an ocean as in “[‘Summer is in the earth and in the sky’].”

Even in the latter circumstance, however, the torrents are not paragons of fear and wonderment. Instead, they often implicate the comfort of shelter and the promise of calm brought about in the cyclical rounding out of nature. For example, in “Autumn” Clare depicts the changing weather as destructive, “rude”(3), and “severe”(18). A tempest rolls through the lines of the poem, but when it clears, “seasons yet to come” (24) speak of regeneration. Not only does the storm poetically tire nature, as “nature seemith weary”

(4), but it also decimates flowers, birds’ mates, and green leaves. It does not, however, destroy or harm people—that is, the poet or the reader. Clare’s poem presents natural time as generational. Hence, the august storm is part of a larger whole. In this light, the storm can be seen to inflict a destruction that purges. Like poetry itself, the storm is

cathartic; it clears old growth for new. Until the green returns, “Happy love that warms the heart” (17) will temper the storm’s severity and insulate us against winter—not to mention life’s metaphorical storms. Fortified by love’s security and the knowledge that spring and summer will come once more, Clare or Clare’s poetic speaker embraces rather than fears the autumn weather: “in seasons yet to come” (24) “joys, and flowers, smell as sweet” (23).

Even in the middle of a more dangerous gale, Clare’s figures generally find themselves safe as houses. That is, they sit indoors, perhaps by a warm fire, perhaps with a book. More often than not, the storm quiets and gives way to a clear, bright day. Clare’s storm scenes, then, seem to be a throwback to an earlier mode of description that includes a balance of positive and negative elements, light and dark. “Before the eighteenth century, depictions of storm and disaster in European art and literature frequently occur in relation to imagery of calm and order” (28), writes Lawrence Goedde. In both painting and poetry, it was a commonly held practice to manifest a divinely controlled cosmology of harmony and balance. For instance, Goedde selects Dutch painter Simon de Vlieger’s

“A Ship Wrecked off a Rocky Coast” (1640) as exemplary of the trend. In this seascape, the artist juxtaposes a vessel violently tossed by waves and immanent thunderclouds against the sun brightening a corner of the sky and a boat safely making its passage in the distance. Similarly, Addison praises a passage from Psalm 107 for containing the same composition of elements:

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters:

these see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep. For he

commandeth and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waters

thereof. They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the

depths….Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth

them out of their distresses. He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves

thereof are still. (“No. 489 Saturday, September 20, 1712”)

This biblical excerpt resonates with Addison as sublime because, as he writes, God is capable of “troubling and becalming nature.” In this selection, Addison interprets the presentation of divine power over nature—over life and death—as terrifying and absolute. For Clare, however, the safety which many of his poetic speakers enjoy in relation to a threatening storm challenges the traditional sublime because it suggests that one can experience ecstasy without being endangered, in apparent comfort.

Later, romantic art and Burk’s writings shift the focus onto human emotion and terror, onto power from which one cannot escape. Goedde pinpoints two dominant means of evoking the sublime through perspective in storm paintings:

One provides a close-up focus on human beings and their emotional and

physical responses in situations of extreme peril….[and the other] make[s]

the ships and people small within a panorama of cliffs, waves, and clouds.

The effect is to depict the submission of vessels to vastly superior natural

forces and to reinforce the vulnerability of…human beings” (27)

In other words, artists conjure fright and arouse strong emotion by suggesting danger, utter destruction, and death. Human subjects—human frailty and desperation in particular—take center stage, either in a microcosm or macrocosm. Yet, because Clare’s poetic resists an entirely human-centered approach, his work goes against this trend. As

Clare sees the natural world to be an interconnected living ecosystem, his storms have a

lot in common with the Psalmist passage that Addison admires.

While he recognizes the possibilities of natural devastation, Clare’s poetic eye takes in all kinds of weather and looks on humans and animals equally. Many of his pastoral characters, such as the shepherd, hedger, molecatcher, farmer, and yard-boy confront stormy weather (Robinson), but they do so during the course of their mundane work and leisure. Even sheep find themselves caught in the downpour, but not many humans or animals appear to be distressed by the rain. In “[Storm in the Fens]” (264), for example, both the human and animal creatures caught in the storm seem to be only mildly bothered by the turbulent weather. The duck is able to retreat “above the storm” (4), while the waters “play” (5). To the peasant, the wind sounds like “a stranger knocked agen the door” (14). There is a “careless boat” (21), and the birds “lazy wings” (18)

“scarcely cared to flye” (20). Moreover, in “[Sheep in Winter],” the sheep “lye all night and face the drizzling storm / And shun the hovel where they might be warm” (13-4).

At first glance, a storm seems to be more of an inconvenience than anything else.

Rain not only delays or interrupts harvesting, but it also affects a poet’s ability to amble over fields. In “The Cottager,” Clare depicts a working man, a man like himself who labored on and with the land. At the end of the poem, we encounter the presence of a storm, given almost offhandedly. Within his cottage, the man goes about his business unaffected by would-be brutal weather:

And thus he lives too happy to be poor

While strife neer pauses at so mean a door

Low in the sheltered valley stands his cot

He hears the mountain storm and feels it not (95-8)

Human toil comes to a point in the mountain storm, but the cottager is either unaware, or simply unafraid. The physical storm is audible but equivocal. Does it loom above the meager home, or is it far off in the distance? Simultaneously, the reader confronts two storms: one metaphorical and another literal. At the level of metaphor, the life of a country laborer is filled with exertion and worry, and the cottager finds delight in it. The reader pauses over the conjunction “and” in line 98, which could just as easily be a “but.”

At stake in the word choice is not only the cottager’s acceptance of his hardships, but also his taste and his capacity to appreciate natural objects, to experience the traditional sublime in the storm. If the cottager hears the storm, but “feels it not,” then he misses the sublime. When he hears the storm, and he does not feel its force, it is emblematic of a life

“happy as a child at play” (104), a life not untouched, but unaffected by poverty. Instead, the cottager gains his pleasure from small things. He experiences the mundane sublime.

By Clare’s standards outlined in his prose passage “[Taste],” the cottager is nevertheless a “man of discernment” (417). Clare’s characterization of the discerning man is a revision of the conventional civilized gentleman, an educated and cultured individual possessing a refined palette. The cottager does not have the sophistication of a typical “man of taste” who, upon seeing some worthy spectacle like a mountain storm, has the appropriate response: he feels a pleasurable pain, contemplates existence, and recalls lines of poetry. In contrast, the descriptions of the cottager’s defense of defenseless animals, church attendance, modest book collection, and wreaths made of

Pooty shells create an impression of naivete, rural innocence, and purity.

When he comments on James Macpherson’s apocryphal Ossian, Hugh Blair argues in favor of an uncivilized man such as the cottager possessing a taste for

sublimity. Blair describes “unprogressed” poetry to be better suited to the sublime because it has access to fundamental experience:

The events recorded, are all serious ad grave; the scenery throughout, wild

and romantic. The extended heath by the sea shore; the mountain shaded

with mist; the torrent rushing through a solitary valley; the scattered oaks,

and the tombs of warriors overgrown with moss; all produce a solemn

attention in the mind, and prepare it for great and extraordinary events.

(209)

Even though the collected mythological poetry of Ossian turned out to be a hoax—not a long-lost ancient Gaelic epic, but a product of Macpherson himself—Blair’s assertion that sublimity may be felt by the “primitive” remains. While Blair permits some flexibility to the type of person capable of experiencing the sublime, he does not do the same for the object inspiring it. In Clare’s poem, the cottager’s sons “[roam] about on raptures easy wing” (93) as they look for Pooty shells. They are caught in ecstasy. Rather than the storm, it is the Pooty shell that makes “a pigmy… of the pride of man”

(“[Hunting Pooty Shells]”).

In Clare’s poem, the preference for the Pooty shell over the mountain storm as that which stirs emotion and inspires awe figures the mundane sublime. On one level, the

Pooty shell is a mundane object that arouses wonderment because it participates in eternity: “the house of a poor simple snail horn would out live them and their proudest temples by centurys…every trifle also has a lesson to bespeak the wisdom and forethought of the Deity” (“[Hunting Pooty Shells]”). On another level, the shell is associated with ecology because it recalls domesticity and family. The animal that is the

Pooty shell carries his house on his back; he is always at home in the world. For the cottager, the shell wreathes carry the memory of childhood and his sons. The delight the cottager and his sons receive from such mundane objects eclipses the hardships of their social station. Because the sublime arises from the Pooty shell rather than the storm, the poem establishes a tension between culture and nature, poverty and wealth, decay and endurance. Here, natural wisdom trumps formal education and culturally defined norms of taste and refinement. A local farming village makes a more preferable setting than some exotic site or vast plain. Appreciation and respect for the mundane surpasses appreciation for the mountain storm. In this way, Clare brings the sublime experience down from its lofty heights.

In contrast, Coleridge’s narrator in “Dejection: An Ode” wishes for a storm to bring him out of his depressive state of weary expectation. With the moon as his omen, the narrator hopes to hear those stormy sounds which “…oft have raised me, whilst they awed, / And sent my soul abroad” (17-18). In this poem, Coleridge presents the storm as a lutanist whose music speaks of tumult and frenzy. During the eye of the storm, the tune changes, and the voice of a young, lost girl can be heard. Overall, Coleridge’s tempest is much more “poetic” than Clare’s. It is affective, evocative, and transportative, whereas

Clare’s storm is barely even perceived or registered.

Certainly, though, “The Cottager” contains only one example of a Clarean storm.

In the eleventh stanza of “The Last of March” (93) from the “helpston period,” the narrator seeks protection from rain by perching against a stone wall:

Here sheltering ’neath the ancient wall

I still pursue my musing dreams

Here in the mouth of every clown

The ‘Roman road’ familiar sounds;

All else with everlasting frown

Oblivions mantling mist surrounds (85-9).

In these lines, Clare mocks the Burkean sublime by drawing attention to its clichéd usage.

While clowns or foolish tourists might speak of the road in reverential tones as sublime, the speaker’s eyes are caste down upon the ground:

The Spirit of the tempest call.

Here sheltering ‘neath the ancient wall

I still pursue my musing dreams,

And as the hailstones round me fall

I mark their bubbles in the streams (84-8)

Because the narrator is more interested in the small concentric ripples that the hailstones make when they fall “mark[ing] their bubbles in the streams” (88) than the gloomy history of the road, this poem follows a similar pattern to that of “The Cottager.” The speaker entertains his “musing dreams” regardless of the rain and the architecture that should provoke thoughts of ancient times and the unknown course of history. The “hardy seedsman” (51) continues to work in the field “[i]n stript defiance to the storms” (50), and at the end of the poem, the weather clears making way for spring flowers. Both the

Roman ruins and the storm itself are incidental.

In “The Peasant Poet,” Clare at once describes himself and a generalized individual who is closely linked to the land: “To him the dismal storm appeared / The very voice of God” (5-6). There is a synesthetic quality in the diction. While the verb

“appeared” may be used to encompass all sense perceptions, it is most appropriate for the visual. Clare makes the storm a material manifestation or likeness of divine voice, and leads readers to envision God not only as the creator, but also as located or reflected in

Nature. This man who is both peasant and poet—“A peasant in his daily cares / A Poet in his joy” (15-6)—loves all which meets his eye “for his sake” (12). Even though a storm might be figured here as God’s voice, it is not the voice of an angry, wrathful God. In this scene, terror is replaced by all encompassing, all infusing love. The storm is simply an additional phenomenon among a myriad of “Creatures”(11)—the brook, the swallow, the sky stretching between horizons, and the insects. This picture portrays the mundane sublime because an ordinary storm figures interconnectedness. All humans and nonhuman animals alike feel the rain.

In “The Robins Nest,” furthermore, the tempest is an opportunity for finding and utilizing shelter, for experiencing the mundane sublime in the midst of a storm:

And moss as green as silk—there let me be

By the grey powdered trunk of old oak tree

Buried in green delights to which the heart

Clings with delight and beats as loath to part (13-7)

…………………………………………………..

Lost in such extacys in this old spot

I feel that rapture which the world hath not

That joy like health that flushes in my face

Amid the brambles of this ancient place

Shut out from all but that superior power

That guards and glads and cheers me every hours

That wraps me like a mantle from the storm (23-9)

To “feel that rapture which the world hath not” (24) is to feel an unrepresentable surplus

(save for in apophasis, in the negative) that is characteristic of the traditional sublime.

The catalyst for this feeling, however, is the mundane old oak tree. Here, as in “The

Cottager,” the very joy of nature is figured as aegis, as a protective shield. There is a litany of poems in Clare’s oeuvre that function in this manner.

For example, in “O wert thou in a storm,”6 the refrain emphasizes not only the need for protection, but also the growing inseparability between the gusts of wind and rain and shelter. Moreover, in “Snow Storm” (199), Clare pictures the white covered pastures and hills as a romantic scene. One can peer out of doors at a magical, glistening wonderland, all the while staying warm indoors in solitude with a book. In an ode “To my Cottage,” Clare grows nostalgic for childhood, especially the comfort of being inside when storms raged outside: “dearer still the happy winter night / When the storm pelted down wi all his might / And roard and bellowd in the chimney top” (4-6). We see more clearly that winter can offer reprieve from working in the fields in “The Shepherd’s

Calendar.” Indeed, winter gives a gift for which laborers have wished: “In winters surley depth how sweet / To meet those comforts we desire/ Possesing some snug corner seat”

(“Winter” 33-5). The winter storms allow for the solitude that is necessary for contemplation. They permit one to experience the mundane sublime and to contemplate the curious tension between the inside and the cold outside, between the artificial and the natural.

6 This poem is a tribute and reworking of Burns’s “o wert thou in a cold blast.” 37

Hugh Blair posits that, while a storm is sublime, “it is not enough, either to give us mere general expressions concerning the violence of the tempest, or to describe its common vulgar effect, in overthrowing trees and houses. It must be painted with such circumstances as fill the mind with great and awful ideas” (40). Clare does not put this theory into practice. On one hand, this tendency might be seen to illustrate Strickland’s characterization of Clare as “more picturesque than sublime” (143). He writes, “even in the Northamptonshire Asylum poem ‘The Wind & Trees’ when he compares trees in a storm to turbulent waves, the effect is less of terror than merry vivacity.”

Notwithstanding, Clare’s poetry presents the mundane sublime As the weather does not directly threaten the animals and humans, there is less of a distinction drawn between the forces of nature and nature’s subjects/objects. As part of nature, the storms are not to be feared. Rather, it is the human who is capable of destroying the ecosystem.

4. ENCLOSING CLARE’S ECOSYSTEM; ANGUISH IN AN ECONOMY OF MIND

What remains unfinished is envisioning the human self in this new place. This re-vision might begin with an analysis of the ecosublime in cultural representation of at-risk ecologies. --Lee Rozelle, Ecosublime

I feel ecstasies, inexpressible raptures, when I melt, so to speak, into the system of being, and when I identify myself with the whole of nature. --J.J. Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker

I was a being created in the race Of men disdaining bounds of place and time:— A spirit that could travel o’er the space Of earth and heaven,—like a thought sublime, --John Clare, “I Am”

On the brink of adulthood, John Clare bore witness to the British enclosure movement. Spurred on by a faulty economic theory based on the idea that common land usage would lead to the depletion of resources, this initiative privatized those lands shared by villagers in his Helpston home. Ultimately driven by the greed of the gentry, open fields were fenced off, no trespassing signs were posted, and existing trees and streams were moved/re-routed, destroyed, or blocked off. From 1809 to 1816, when the topographical reorganization was “more or less completed” (Barrell 106), the movement joined the six neighboring parishes into one, paradoxically more segmented, piece of land—essentially “rationali[zing] the layout of” the Fitzwilliam estate (106). While this process geographically re-shaped the meaning of the land, it literally shaped the meaning

of the land for Clare.

For this reason, there are numerous writings pertaining to Clare and place as well as Clare and enclosure. In particular, many scholars stress the relationship between the condition of the land, Clare’s distance from Helpston, and the poet’s psychological state.

Specifically, Barrell’s analysis ties Helpston to Clare’s selfhood when he writes, “his own identity, like that of the trees and flowers, depends on his staying where he is” (122).

Furthermore, in his consideration of Clare’s spacial phenomenology, Bate likens Clare to

Gaston Bachelard for whom “the interior order of the human mind is inextricable from the environmental space which [he] inhabit[s]” (173). For both Bachelard and Clare, to live in the world is to inhabit, to dwell in a space, a home ecology. Already fragile from mental illness, Clare’s poetry and letters reveal that alterations to the landscape were profoundly unsettling. Enclosure not only damages the land, but it also causes pain on a psychological level.

There is certainly more at stake here than Clare’s sanity. Quoting Bachelard, Bate portrays Clare as an artist who blurs the boundaries between the personal and the public, between the subject and object, between the land and the mind: “‘Poets will help us to discover within ourselves such joy in looking that sometimes, in the presence of a perfectly familiar object, we experience an extension of our intimate space’” (qtd. in Bate

173). Bachelard is referring here to the poetic process by which we experience immensity and grandeur, but the statement becomes more complex if we read it literally. What does it mean to experience the world as an extension of self? Are we a part of the world, or is the world a part of us (and how would we ever know the difference)? At the very least,

Bachelard’s words signal a distortion of the limits between subject and object. I see this

as a continuation of Longinus’s proclamation that when we experience sublime writing,

“we are filled with joy and pride, as if we had ourselves produced the very thing we heard” (179). Bate too follows this line of thinking when he turns from Clare’s aesthetic treatment of enclosure to legal and political considerations: “what the life and work of

John Clare can show us is that even in terms of pragmatic self-interest it is to our benefit to care for nature’s rights—our inner ecology cannot be sustained without the health of ecosystems” (174).

Pursuing a different angle of inquiry, Houghton-Walker’s focus on Clare’s spiritual inclinations and his religious practice demonstrates how he often likens pre- enclosure land to pre-lapsarian life: “what is destroyed by the coming into knowledge of adulthood is a simplicity of mind which does not (or perhaps cannot) seek to over-reach its knowledge and thus shares a special relationship with creation, through which it can perceive creation as edenic (pre-knowledge)” (Religion 159). Many of his poems express nostalgia for pre-enclosure time: for less touched land, the “golden days” of childhood, purity, and innocence. Not only does Clare mourn lost trees, but because he associates the land with his childhood, such trees suggest the passage of time leading to the corruption of adulthood, and ultimately to death. In this way, his poetry follows the romantic model of human education from Friedrich Schiller and Hegel: man falls through self-division, and then he walks a circuitous path back to his place of origin which is more whole than the unity from which he came (Abrams 255). Writ large, enclosed land is an external manifestation of an internal split, of fragmentation and specialization brought about by industrialization. Not only does enclosure create boundaries, but it also symbolizes man overstepping his bounds more generally. It portrays human ignorance for and violence

against the interconnected ecosystem.

Specifically regarding the connection between the British enclosure movement and the sublime, Houghton-Walker theorizes the following:

If Clare’s experience of sublimity occurs in the natural world, much of

which (as we are repeatedly reminded) was effectively ‘taken away’ by

Enclosure, then one might suggest that it was the beautiful, according to

Clare’s perception, which was enclosed, and the sublime is extra to the

objective realty of that beauty – the sublime is thus resistant to enclosure,

and can still be experienced if the imagination remembers what was.

(“Enkindling” 190)

Houghton-Walker reads Clare’s “Shadows of Taste” and likens his sense of ecstasy directly to the land, to the bounded land that is Helpston: “Taken away from his home,

Clare’s capacity for rapture is diminished, and with it the grounding of his faith”

(Religion 161). According to this reading, land scarred by enclosure could not possibly overpower the spectator while bringing on feelings of terror and awe because it is bounded. Only unbounded, seemingly never-ending tracts of land or sea can generate thoughts of infinity in the onlooker: “The bounded is loathed by its possessor….Less than

All cannot satisfy Man” (There Is No Natural Religion). Even though Houghton-Walker argues that it is the faculty of experiencing rapture that is weakened by changes to the landscape and moving a few miles from home, this observation contradicts her previous statement concerning the beautiful. We must make certain theoretical accommodations if we are to believe that the sublime is both dependent upon material observation and free from it. The traditional romantic sublime functions through a string of substitutions: we

trade up, a seemingly unending field for eternity, a life threatening (but safe) danger for ultimate divine power. As with Coleridge’s insistence on the role of metaphor in bringing about the sublime moment, the experience of the sublime as it arises from an encounter with nature must take place in the mind, in imagination and memory. It achieves a vertical transcendence.

The claim that unbounded land is the only catalyst for the sublime experience goes against my formulation of the mundane sublime. Enclosed land can certainly bring about sublime rapture, especially if we consider two key elements. Firstly, the mundane sublime begins with a normally overlooked natural phenomenon. “Our experience of ecological peril,” according to Jonathan Bordo, “is not aesthetic in the classical sense. It is an ordinary, everyday happening” (qtd. in Rozelle 85). Combined with the proliferation of factories and pollution, enclosure outlines artificial boundaries and fences, but it hardly destroys the environment on an apocalyptic scale.7 Mundanely enclosed land is particularly good at generating tension between the part and the whole because it is an obvious visual demarcation not only between the land and itself, but also between the human and the land. Enclosed land highlights the human in the landscape and underscores the simultaneous connection and separation existent, or culturally constructed, between the human and the non-human world.

Secondly, the mundane sublime functions through association rather than substitution, through synecdoche and metonymy, rather than metaphor. Clare sees a mundane object in 3D: in mythological or Biblical space-time, in his personal and poetic

7 To clarify, I do not believe enclosure was mundane for Clare. Instead, it was violent and traumatizing. Still, I think Bordo’s words ring true for a general population of people who are not or were not as invested in the land as Clare was. 43

lifetime, and in the present ecosystem of Helpston. Laterally, a common natural object brings to mind the larger ecosystem in which it belongs and resides. Presented in poetry, a fenced field may still recall a biological pyramid. Rather than up and away, the mundane sublime gets us looking around and thinking round. When Clare presents a piece of land that is touched by enclosure, we literally find ourselves in the process of looking about: we look at our hand in the environment.

When Clare writes about enclosure or even typical changes to the landscape caused by the passage of time, he reads traces of trees, shrubs, rocks, and riverbeds. He summons these images from memory and laments their disappearance. In particular,

Barrell discusses three poems which present a narrator doing this very activity:

“Helpstone,” “Helpstone Green,” and “The Lamentations of Round Oak Waters.” Partly because the two former were written earlier than the third, Barrell describes them as plagued by a “confusion” (110) of mixed poetic influence and mixed emotion. Arguably, these two poems are fragmented and disjointed “oppose[ing] the permanence of the natural landscape against the transience of youth” (111). While each poem is unique showing a progression in Clare’s interests and style, they share an interesting feature. In all three of the poems, the narrator provides details of particular events or “characters” only after thinking about or looking at a larger whole, or collection. That is, the enclosed land is first viewed en masse, and then the particulars are presented or recalled. As setting or background8, the town of Helpston gives way to “the church the brook the cottage and the tree” (47); a view of the river to “the shepherd” (“Lamentations” 61), “the Cowboy”

(65) as well as “the insect and the flower” (89); and the “injur’d fields” (“Helpston

8 For further reading, see Timothy Morton’s discussion of ambiance in Ecology. 44

Green” 1) to its respective component parts in healthier times.

“Helpstone” gives a panoramic depiction of its namesake. Moving from the large to the small, the poem ironically glorifies Helpston just as it points to its lack of recognition: “thy mean village lifts its lowly head / Unknown to grandeur and unknown to fame / No minstrel boasting to advance thy name” (2-4). While Helpston may be mundane, the narrator proceeds to recount the particular happenings throughout the town.

Surprisingly, one such activity is described with the word sublime:

Though now no more—fond memory’s pleasing pains

Within her breast your every scene retains

Scarce did a bush spread its romantic bower

To shield the lazy shepherd from the shower

Scarce did a tree befriend the chattering pye

By lifting up its head so proud and high

(Whose nest stuck on the topmost bough sublime

Mocking the efforts of each boy to climb

As oft in vain my skill essay’d to try) (147-155)

The activity depicted above is not a terrible experience; climbing a tree is an ordinary youthful activity. Given Clare’s disdain for the hyperbole and bombast associated with the sublime, we are lead to wonder at the word’s use here. Its location in an aside, bracketed off between parentheses, is curious. Is the branch sublime because it is the tallest point of the tree, or because it mocks? “[E]ssay’d to try” (155) implies a double effort: the narrator attempts to try, and he tries to tell and explain the experience in language.

McKusick suggests that the force of “Helpstone” resides “not [in] the sheer quantity of factual information on local flora and fauna, but a deeper sense of the relation of all creatures to a habitat in which the human observer is also implicated” (80). His use of the word implicated is particularly poignant and appropriate because its multiple meanings coincide with the multiple implications of the human in the environment made apparent through considerations of enclosure and the mundane sublime. Not only is the human intimately related to the ecosystem, but he or she is also made aware of the self in the system. In addition, we feel responsible and response-able to and for nature. We attribute meaning to nature, including but not limited to the perception that the system is a system. Ultimately though, we discover that nature itself is overdetermined.9

In “Helpstone,” a memory figuring the mundane sublime—a simple moment to reach the highest branch—makes one cognizant of his or her multifaceted participation in the ecosystem. Firstly, it does so by creating sympathy between the human and the nonhuman animal. At the beginning of the second stanza, the birds are “bent on higher view”

(28), “searching for food and ‘better life’ in vain” (25) just like the villagers are want to do. There is “a universal hope the whole pervades” (35). The syntax allows for at least two meanings: hope pervades the whole, and the whole pervades all. Similarly, “The

Lamentations of Round Oak Waters” figures the same fellow feeling. In this poem, the boundary between human and nonhuman is blurred in mutual sympathy for one another.

The narrator, and presumably Clare, crouches by the riverbank. Together, they survey the

9 Implicate: a. to intertwine b. to entangle mentally, to confuse; 1.a. To involce in its nature or meaning, or as a consequence or inference; to imply; to comprise b. To involve (a person) in a charge, crime, etc. c. To involve or include in the operation of something; to affect or cause to be affected in the action of something. (OED) 46

destruction and compare it to beautiful scenes long gone. The river and the young man place blame not on those poor day laborers who were employed to do the job, but instead on the wealthy land owners and law makers:

And every Bush and tree

Dire nakedness oer all prevails

Yon fallows bare and brown

Is all beset wi’ post and rails

And turned upside down (96-100)

This violence approaches rape, as it is described as a kind of denuding, stripping, making vulnerable and laying bare. The posts punctuate and penetrate the land. As the young man cries, the river runs, and the rain falls:

I bow’d my head to misery

And yielded to the storm

And there I fancied uncontrould

My sorrows as they flew

Unnotic’d as the waters rowl’d

Where all unnoticed too (27-32)

With imagery reminiscent of Milton’s “Lycidas,” the human tears, the river water, and the rainwater all mix together as the sorrows are shared. Not only does the narrator mourn his deceased friend, but he also weeps for feeling ostracized from his community that seems to delight in the violence done to the land.

In both poems, however, the relationship between the human and the ecosystem is tainted. That is, the human is responsible for damages and crimes against the land.

“Helpstone” juxtaposes children at play—scaling a tree, peeking in at a bird’s nest, or worse yet, stealing eggs—against the perpetrators of enclosure “whose cursed weapon levels half the land” (124). It contrasts animal aspirations, presumably founded in instinct, with juvenile curiosity and exploration as well as adult gluttony. Not only does enclosure reorder, separate, and demarcate the land, it also politicizes the soil and leaves a human footprint on the landscape. The human-perpetuated enclosure movement manipulates and intrudes in upon the interconnectedness of Helpston. Therefore, witnessing enclosed land entreats one to evaluate him or herself framed by in ethical relationship to Nature.

In this fashion, the experience of the mundane sublime as we confront enclosure can be seen as a proto-postmodern sublime. Following Bordo’s work on Lyotard’s reappropriation of the sublime, Hitt writes, “the sublime in this case is evoked not by natural objects but by their devastation. Human beings still experience a humbling sense of fear and awe before nature, but in this case—in contradistinction to conventional accounts of the sublime—the threat is of their own making” (Hitt 619).10 The mundane sublime enkindled by enclosure sets us to reflect upon the human relationship to Nature.

Stealing eggs, privatizing public lands, and cutting down trees are all instances of human violence for which we could or should feel fearful or ashamed. Just as one should be terrified at a threatening storm, Clare projects terror at encountering the human capacity for destruction: “To think how money’d men delight / More cutting then the storm / To make a sport and prove their might / O’ me a fellow worm” (“Lamentations” 21-24). In

10 Jonathan Bordo's "Ecological Peril, Modern Technology, and the Postmodern Sublime" draws on Lyotard's theory of the sublime in The Postmodern Condition. 48

this light, we can see a re-emergence of the classic Burkean fear brought back in the form of anguish, in radical self-doubt. Shame replaces pride for the ascendancy of the human imagination

In this way, the postmodern and the mundane sublime work against the nineteenth century thrust to situate the human as dominant over nature. Wordsworth’s Prelude exhibits this tendency, and Kant presents it as a “success through failure.” In contrast to this model, Clare’s memory of reaching toward the sublime branch in “Helptsone,” establishes a tension: we see ourselves in nature, we are part of nature, and still we inflict damages upon a nature for which we feel sympathy, yet nonetheless do not understand. In his influential book Song of the Earth, Bate comments on this tension: “[t]he simultaneity of belonging and alienation, swelling and writing, is the source of [Clare’s] profundity as a poet of both location and dislocation” (156). Faced with such opposing forces, we are barred from dominance. The mundane sublime does not figure human authority over nature as a result of any epiphanic moments. Instead, the revelatory feeling is itself one of coinciding unity and estrangement.

“As an adult,” writes Ann Barton, “[Clare] deplored such depredations—the ruined nests and distraught parents birds—but he was also fully aware that he had robbed nests himself….[he] wrestled throughout his writing life with the problem of man’s cruelty to the brute creation and—crucially—with the question of where to draw the line”

(608). Accordingly, Clare’s poems beg important questions pertaining to environmental ethics: Is our predatory nature as natural and potentially justifiable as a cat’s? How can we be stewards of the land? Is it possible to leave no trace? What does a responsible encounter with an environment look like? To these questions, there are no satisfactory,

concrete answers. We are paralyzed. We are stunned into silence.

We are stunned into silence, but it is a silence that begs to be broken. Clare confronts the mundane sublime, and he must write about it, putting the experience into words to be shared with others. One of Clare’s most famous asylum poems may be read as a reaction to enclosure, a reaction and a response to man’s inhumanity to man and to nature. In “I Am,” Clare imagines a radical landscape without human footprints, without his own footprints:

I long for scenes where man has never trod;

A place where woman never smil'd or wept;

There to abide with my creator, God,

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;

The grass below--above the vaulted sky. (“I Am”)

The speaker desires to be like a slumbering child neither a disturbance nor disturbed.

Houghton-Walker singles out this poem as a prominent example of Clare’s sublime. “For

Clare,” she explains, “the experience of the sublime is very much a giving of self in a passive reception of rapture” (“Enkindling” 190). She contends that this “results in a glorious admiration of self in the sublime moment, and a reception of the poetry of life, figured through that of the poem” (190). Here, though, there is a rejection of self and of mankind, an abnegation of subjectivity as the “I” wishes to be “[w]here there is neither sense of life or joys” (9).

In contrast to Houghton-Walker, Timothy Morton’s reading of the poem gives no such optimistic resolution. Both the reader and the narrator are left in a crippling doubt:

‘I Am’ is the stunning moment at which this otherness is perceived as

intrinsic to the self, at a terrible cost. Clare does not know who he is, as a

horribly vivid letter from the asylum indicates. But this not knowing is a

hard-won moment of actual subjectivity, in which, if we are to take Clare

as an ecopoet seriously, we have lost nature, but gained ecology. (200)

Morton’s deeper, greener, and darker ecocriticism resonates with my conception of the mundane sublime. For Morton, doing away with the notion of nature as distinct from humanity and civilization, all the while recognizing our inability to know nature and nonhuman animals, is a more environmentally and critically responsible way to think about the world. He continues, “Environment as theory, as wonder, as doubt, does not achieve escape velocity form [sic] the earth, but, in fact, sinks down into it further than any wishful thinking, any naïve concept of interconnectedness could push us” (200). “Far from giving us a liturgy for how to get out of our guilty minds, how to stick our heads in nature and lose them,” writes Morton, “Clare helps us to stay right here, in the poisoned mud” (201) between the “grass” and “the vaulted sky.”

Strikingly, though, this radical staying in place is not the final response to an encounter with the mundane sublime. When one experiences the mundane sublime, one is caught up in the tension, in the agitation between feeling at home in the world and feeling uneasy at home. While the mundane sublime demonstrates that we are connected in an ecosystem, it does not follow that we understand what that means or what that demands of us in return. But, then there is writing, which is itself an assertion of selfhood. As Bate suggests, our response to nature, and nature’s declaration of rights, “can only be expressed by means of celebratory narrative. They require not an Enlightenment project

but a Romantic riot of sketches, fragments and tales—narratives of community, reminiscences of walking and working, vignettes of birds and their nests, animations of children and insects and grass” (Bate 170). We turn and we share that pleasurable pain which arises from facing the Other (autrui), from facing many others in Nature.

Notwithstanding this self-affirmation, the act of sharing in writing does not propel us out of our guilt or our doubt. Writing does not always translate to action, and we must trust that what is shared is received; we take a poem’s reception as an act of faith. Through poetry, through the aesthetics of the mundane sublime, a shared not knowing might be exactly the liturgy we need as a response to our “naïve concept of interconnectedness:” liturgy for liturgy’s sake.11 Rather than taking us to higher philosophical abstractions, the mundane sublime comes full circle, and together we are forced to deal with our presence, or presentness, in nature.

11 See Levinas: “[A] work without renumeration, whose result is not allowed for in the time of the Agent and is assured only for patience, a work that is effected in the complete domination of and surpassing of my time, liturgy is not to be ranked alongside ‘works’ and ethics. It is ethics itself” (50). 52

5. CONCLUSION

When everything else has gone from my brain—the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that. --Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

Dear Sir I am in a Madhouse & quite forget your Name or who you are You must excuse me for I have nothing to commu[n]icate or tell of & why I am shut up I don’t know I have nothing to say so I conclude yours respectfully --John Clare, March 8th 1860

In one of only a few studies on John Ashbery’s dedication poem to John Clare,

Ben Hickman locates Clare’s influence on Ashbery in his style. Hickman notes that it is not Clare’s content or subject matter that catches the prolific poet’s attention, but instead, it is Clare’s manner of apprehending time and space in a moment of writing, his ability to

“capture the rhythms of nature, its vagaries and messiness” (OT 15). On the other hand,

Ashbery himself delineates his interest in Clare in his published lecture series Other

Traditions. It is “his seeming modernity” (OT 15) and his “nakedness of vision,” his

“inspired bricolage” (20) and the sense of “stasis within movement” (20) evoked by his poetry that earns Clare the title of “a poet’s poet.” Ashbery describes Clare’s work as “a distillation of the natural world with all its beauty and pointlessness, its salient and boring features preserved intact” (OT 11). The enjoyment derived from reading Clare, then, is not necessarily gained through novelty and immensity, but from the aggregate of bland

and bold together, from an appraisal of the whole. Without utilizing the word “mundane,”

Ashbery nevertheless arouses the same sentiment that I have been engaged in describing.

He finds Clare’s poetry to be as James Reeves puts it, “like the central English countryside where [his poems] grew, unsensational, undramatic, revealing their beauties more to the dweller than the visitor” (qtd. in OT 10). I would like to suggest also that it is

Clare’s encounter with and expression of the mundane sublime that Ashbery reads, re- reads, and then re-writes in “For John Clare.”

Even though the subject matter of Clare’s poetry is pastoral and prosaic, Ashbery remarks that the very experience of reading John Clare is to “re-insert [one] into the present, of re-establishing ‘now’” (OT 19). It is to “get down in the grass” (13). Given

Ashbery’s special awareness of Clare’s ability to place the reader in time and in nature, it is no surprise that his own poem on Clare should achieve a similar end. According to

Hickman, Ashbery’s “For John Clare” “doesn’t go back to Clare’s work, but comes out of it. That is, it creates itself only after becoming immersed in the whole Clarean style and aesthetic” (4). While Ashbery’s is a prose poem, rather than a short lyrical sonnet characteristic of Clare, it highlights the significance of perception (and the inherent problems therein) by positioning the subject amidst too much detail to comprehend. The overwhelming onslaught of perceptual artifacts materializes within the structure of the poem, in the punctuation and stream of conscious narrative. The opening of “For John

Clare” exhibits both the form and content described:

Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and

salutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The

feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone's mind. Then there is

no telling how many there are. They grace everything--bush and tree--to

take the roisterer's mind off his caroling--so it's like a smooth switch back.

To what was aired in their previous conniption fit. There is so much to be

seen everywhere that it's like not getting used to it, only there is so much it

never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that

building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and

the mind boggles.

According to Hickman, “For John Clare” illustrates the poets’ shared poetics of process that centers itself in present moments so particularized that they are without any particular vision or end. Both poets have been characterized by their “immediacy,” but

Hickman suggests that they each perform a radical narration of perception. That is, their poems are rooted in a progression of description—“rural ephemera” (OT 8), observation, and thought—that happen in time exhibiting an essential “one-thing-after-anotherness.”12

By the end of Ashbery’s first paragraph stanza, we grow accustomed to a pervasive vagary and to seeing multitudes. The act of looking at the building specifically recalls Kant’s mathematical sublime in which one looks at some superlative, a large number of details or an immense structure: “he has the feeling that his imagination is inadequate for exhibiting the idea of the whole, [a feeling] in which imagination reaches its maximum, it sinks back into itself, but consequently comes to feel a liking” (109).

Hickman too notes the presence of the sublime in Ashbery’s poem. He even remarks on the poem’s subversive qualities: “The ‘mind boggles’, as it frequently does in Ashbery’s

12 From Seamus Heaney’s “John Clare: a bi-centenary lecture” quoted by Hickman in John Clare in Context. 55

work, in the meditation on the sublime (‘you cannot take it all in’), but inverts Edmund

Burke’s emphasis on largeness and darkness toward what Ashbery, as I will show, finds compelling in Clare: detail” (Hickman 3). For both Clare and Ashbery, confronting a profusion of insignificant detail halts thought and forces reflection, even if that reflection is fragmented, unresolved, or anticlimactic. Ashbery’s looking overwhelms and distorts, or mucks up one’s cognizance much more so than Clare’s. In contrast with Clare’s work that leaves readers grounded in home, Ashbery’s poem disposes and deterritorializes. So saying, Ashbery’s looking at Clare destabilizes sight itself. As if he were performing a deeper or greener ecological reading of Clare, Ashbery brings us into mind.

Specifically concerning Clare’s “Reflections after an evening walk,” Ashbery comments that “[o]ne did not feel transported from the squishy scene, but pressed further down into it, until with one’s face in the ground one could take in the squillions of dramas in which bugs, worms, and snails were the actors and couch-grass the décor” (OT

18). Here, Ashbery’s phenomenology of reading is akin to the mundane sublime. He even borrows language from the discourse of the traditional sublime when he contrasts his spectatorship with a vision capable of transportation, conveyance, or some uplifting movement. Ashbery’s faculties of perception “take in” Clare’s myriad details. Ashbery’s diction elides knowing and not knowing, for while the word “squillions” is a fictionalized number, a double catachresis for an infinite number, it recalls the squishy, wet scene and the innumerable legions of life in an ecosystem.13 Indeed, faced with the poetic retelling of a natural scene, he becomes part of a creepy-crawly theater. Clare’s poem brings

Ashbery face to face with minutia, and Ashbery’s reading reiterates how one comes up

13 For a similar description, see Annie Dillard’s “Fecundity” in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. 56

against the mundane sublime—not a hurricane, a giant mountain range, or a volcano, but many small, seemingly insignificant things.

Trapped in impressions of these insignificant details, readers question the subject who is actively engaged in looking. At the beginning of the poem, there is a genderless

“it” who emptily looks, and we wonder if this is the same subject who observes that “the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail” at the end of the third stanza. As Morton asks, “What is the “it” when we say “it is raining”? The “it” is Being for Heidegger, ‘a presence of absence,’ since it cannot exist on its own. For Levinas, the it is the horrifying—that is, literally flesh-creeping—quality of sheer existence” (59-60). Together these two segments of the poem—the “empty” seeing and the “probabilities” “coming to life”—recall the Buddhist conception of emptiness.

Reading Ashbery’s poem in this light grants a large measure of optimism to

Clare’s resounding doubt seen in Morton’s consideration of “I am.” This reading permits us to recognize the infinite possibilities of ecological consciousness. So saying, rather than feeling discouraged and paralyzed at the alterity of Jenny wren, we might relish it:

As for Jenny wren, she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was

tryin’ to tell us somethin’, but that’s just it, she couldn’t even if she

wanted to—dumb bird. But the others—and they in some way must know

too—it would never occur to them to want to, even if they could take the

first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that

ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the

moon. So their comment is: “No comment.” Meanwhile the whole history

of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner,

like a sail.

When our language fails, we may still see and experience. In fact, our failing language is witness to and speaks to the experience. Whether we speak or not, whether we write or not, the infinite diversity of an ecosystem still jives on. Looking at Clare’s poetry, we may see how the author feels a sublime pleasurable anguish at confronting the minute and the ordinary, at confronting himself as minute and ordinary. If we permit Clare to show us sublimity in the mundane, then we might also work to undermine the effects of ecoporn, which fetishizes unrealistic vistas and ignores the devastation done to nature at the hand of the human animal. Environmentalists might be inclined to preserve and protect more than the great, the outstanding, and the unique. Ultimately, and most simply, readers might be reminded to renew our relationship to our environment by admiring what we normally take for granted.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abrams, M.H. Natural Supernaturalism Tradition and Revolution in Romantic

Literature. Norton: New York, 1971. Print.

Ashbery, John. Other Traditions. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. Print.

---Collected Poems 1956-1987. Ed. Mark Ford. New York; Literary Classics of

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