In his Defence of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney linked the creative act of the poet with the pursuit of virtue, ‘since our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it.’ There is, of course, something too simple, perhaps even too phallocentric about that account of the matter, and no honest reader of poems, then or now, would see moral improvement or, for that matter, political education, as the end and purpose of his or her absorption in a poetic text. There’s more phenomenological accuracy in John Keats’s notion that poetry surprises by a fine excess, although it’s worth remembering that by ‘excess’ Keats did not mean just a sensuous overabundance of description. What he also had in mind was a general gift for outstripping the reader’s expectation, an inventiveness that cannot settle for the conventional notion that enough is enough, but always wants to extend the alphabet of emotional and technical expression. Even a poem as tonally sombre as, say, ‘Tintern Abbey’ is doing something surprising and excessive, getting further back and deeper in than the poet knew it would, the poet being nevertheless still ready to go with it, to rise to the rhythmic and rhetorical occasion.
At these moments there is always a kind of homoeopathic benefit for the reader in experiencing the shifts and extensions which constitute the life of a poem. An exuberant rhythm, a display of metrical virtuosity, some rising intellectual ground successfully surmounted – experiencing things like these gratifies and furthers the range of the mind’s and the body’s pleasures, and helps the reader to obey the old command: nosce teipsum. Know thyself. If I may quote a stanza from an occasional poem of my own:
This is how poems help us live.
They match the meshes in the sieve
Life puts us through; they take and give
Our proper measure
And prove themselves most transitive
When they give pleasure.
Sidney too was concerned with this tonic effect of poetry when he spoke in his Defence of ‘the … forcibleness or Energia (as the Greeks call it) of the writer’; and it is this original forcibleness, this sensation of clear water springing through sand, that makes work like Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander’ so valuable and guarantees its safe passage through a world of accusing ideologies and impugned ideals.
Oxford Lectures, November 1991; E. J. Pratt Memorial Lecture, Memorial University, Newfoundland, May 1993
John Clare’s Prog
Prog: Gain or profit in a bargain; booty.
Almost thirty years ago, in a poem called ‘Follower’, I wrote about myself as a child dragging along behind my father when he was out ploughing. The poem began:
My father worked with a horse-plough,
and unremarkable as this may have been as a line of verse, it was still the result of some revision. In fact, I had deliberately suppressed the one touch of individuality that had appeared in the first version. Originally I had written:
My father wrought with a horse-plough,
because until relatively recently that verb was the common one in the speech of mid-Ulster. Country people used the word ‘wrought’ naturally and almost exclusively when they talked about a person labouring with certain tools or animals, and it always carried a sense of wholehearted commitment to the task. You wrought with horses or with a scythe or with a plough; and you might also have wrought at hay or at flax or at bricklaying. So the word implied solidarity with speakers of the South Derry vernacular and a readiness to stand one’s linguistic ground: why, then, did I end up going for the more pallid and expected alternative ‘wrorked’?
The answer is, I suppose, because I thought twice. And once you think twice about a local usage you have been displaced from it, and your right to it has been contested by the official linguistic censor with whom another part of you is secretly in league. You have been translated from the land of unselfconsciousness to the suburbs of the mot juste. This is, of course, a very distinguished neighbourhood and contains important citizens like Mr Joyce, persons who sound equally at home in their hearth speech and their acquired language, persons who seem to have obliterated altogether the line between self-conscious and unselfconscious usage, and to have established uncensored access to every coffer of the word-hoard. But this spontaneous multivocal proficiency is as far beyond most writers as unbroken residence within the first idiom of a hermetically sealed, univocal home place. Our language may indeed be our world, but our writing, unless we happen to belong with the multitudinous geniuses like Joyce or Shakespeare, or with those whom we might call the monoglot geniuses – like John Clare – our writing is unlikely ever to be entirely co-extensive with that world.
Clare, we might say, wrought at language but did not become over-wrought about it. Early in his literary career, he had what is called success. His first 1820 volume, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, was reprinted; he went from Helpston to London; he met the well-known writers of the day; he had respect and learned something about the literary milieu. And then, notoriously, the fashion changed, the celebrity dwindled, the publications got spaced out and were less and less noticed until he ended up in Northamptonshire Asylum for the last twenty years of his life, having spent his late thirties and forties in mental confusion, economic distress and poetic neglect. It was only in 1978, for example, that a publisher brought out the extraordinarily copious collection entitled The Mid-Summer Cushion which Clare had ready for printing in the 1830s.
All regrettably true. But for the purposes of re-reading him today, we might express this truth in a different way and say that, after an initial brush with the censor, Clare refused to co-operate. The story of his career, in other words, can be expressed as follows. Once upon a time John Clare was lured to the edge of his word-horizon and his tonal horizon, looked about him eagerly, tried out a few new words and accents and then, wilfully and intelligently, withdrew and dug in his local heels. Henceforth, he declared, I shall not think twice. It is this wilful strength of Clare’s that I want to talk about, how it manifests itself and constitutes the distinctive power of his poetry. And I want to say something also about what his example can mean to poets at the present time, on the eve of his bicentenary year, in social and linguistic conditions of a far more volatile and various sort than those that prevailed when he was negotiating the personal, poetic and historical crises of his prime.
Like all readers, I am indebted to John Barrell’s diagnosis of Clare’s strengths and complications, in so far as it reveals him as a poet who possessed a secure local idiom but operated within the range of an official literary tradition. And previous to Barrell’s work, of course, I read Clare in editions by Geoffrey Summerfield and Eric Robinson. In fact, my only regret in talking about Clare here today is that Geoffrey Summerfield is no longer alive to know about it. His sudden death in February 1991 was a great loss, and not only in the field of Clare studies. But it is some compensation to have his recent Penguin Selected Clare which, taken together with other recent editions by R. K. R. Thornton, Eric Robinson and David Powell, have given us Clare’s works in all their unpunctuated vigour. This modern editorial effort has prepared the way for a wider recognition of the foundedness of Clare’s voice and the sureness of his instinct in cleaving to his original ‘sound of sense’. His unmistakable signature is written in most distinctively and sounded forth most spontaneously in the scores of fourteen-line poems which Clare wrote about small incidents involving the flora and fauna of rural Northamptonshire. Some of these poems are indeed conventional sonnets, with an octave and a turn and a sestet, or with some gesture either to that Petrarchan shape or to the Shakespearean one. But many of them are like the one I’m going to read now, seven couplets wound up like clockwork and then set free to scoot merrily through their foreclosed motions. He seemed to write this kind of poem as naturally as he breathed:
I found a ball of grass among the hay
And proged it as I passed and went away
And when I looked I fancied something stirred
And turned agen and hoped to catch the bird
When out an old mouse bolted in the wheat
With all her young ones hanging at her teats
She looked so odd and so grotesque to me
I ran and wondered what the things could be
And pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood
When the mouse hurried from the crawling brood
The young ones squeaked and when I went away
She found her nest again among the hay
The water oer the pebbles scarce could run
And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun
Clare progged the ball of grass. With equal metrical ease and lexical efficiency, he could have poked it, or with some slight readjustment of the pentameter, he could have prodded it. But had he done either of these things, both he and his readers would have been distanced in a minimal yet essential way from the here-and-nowness, or there-and-thenness, of what happened. I am reminded of a remark made once by an Irish diplomat with regard to the wording of a certain document. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a minor point of major importance.’ In a similar way, the successful outcome of any work of art depends upon the seeming effortlessness and surefingeredness with which such minor points are both established and despatched. To take another instance, there is in this poem a very instructive use of the preposition ‘at’ rather than the more expected ‘from’ or ‘on’, in the couplet:
When out an old mouse bolted in the wheat
With all her young ones hanging at her teats …
‘Hanging on’ would have had certain pathetic, anthropomorphic associations that would have weakened the objective clarity of the whole presentation; ‘hanging from’ would have rendered the baby mice far too passive; ‘hanging at’ suggests ‘catching at’ and itself catches the sudden desperate tiny tightening of the mouse-jaws, and so conveys a reaction that is both biologically automatic and instinctively affectionate. (There is also an echo, of course, of the phrase ‘at the teat’). But the real strength, once again, is the way the idiom has sprung into its place in the line without any trace of choice or forethought on the poet’s part; and in this it partakes of the poem’s overall virtue, which is its notational speed. The couplets hurry in upon themselves as fast as pencil-strokes in an excited drawing and, as in the act of drawing, there is no anxiety about lines repeating and intersecting with the trajectory of other lines. This is why the ‘ands’ and ‘whens’ and self-contained couplets and endstopped movement of the lines do not irk as they might. They are clearly a function of the perception rather than a fault of the execution. They are eager to grab a part of the action. They are both a prerequisite and a consequence of one kind of accuracy and immediacy, as delightful in their compulsively accelerating way as the beautiful deceleration of the two final lines:
The water oer the pebbles scarce could run
And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun.
Once again, what is achieved in this couplet is not a selfconscious effect but a complete absorption. The eye of the writing is concentrated utterly upon what is before it, but also allows what is before it deep access to what is behind it. The eye, at any rate, does not lift to see what effect it is having upon the reader; and this typical combination of deep-dreaming in-placeness and wide-lens attentiveness in the writing is mirrored by the cesspools as they glitter within the sun. They too combine a deep-lodged, hydraulic locatedness within the district with a totally receptive adjustment to the light and heat of solar distances.
And yet, innocent as the poet’s eye may seem, it is worth stressing the point that his poem is as surely made of words as any by Mallarmé. It has a special realism and reliability because it is a naturalist’s observation, but neither the simplicity of its utterance nor the solidity of its content line by line should prevent its being regarded as a poetic achievement of rare finesse and integrity. In fact, in the water that is scarcely fit to run over the pebbles there is to be found an analogue for the thirst or ache at the core of Clare’s poetry. This ache comes from his standing at the frontier of writing, in a gap between the unmistakably palpable world he inhabits and another world, reached for and available only to awakened language.
The kind of excellence I have been praising in ‘The Mouse’s Nest’ was not quite allowed for by the critical language Clare inherited from the eighteenth century. He wrote more richly and strangely than he could have told himself. There is an eerie distance between the materiality of what I have just been discussing and the abstract primness of the following, also by Clare:
A pleasing image to its page conferred
In living character and breathing word
Becomes a landscape heard and felt and seen
Sunshine and shade one harmonizing green …
Thus truth to nature as the true sublime
Stands a mount atlas overpeering time
These lines come from a verse-essay called ‘Shadows of Taste’ and they reveal Clare outside the borders of his first world, rehearsing the new language and aligning himself with the new perspectives of a world beyond. The footwork here is more self-conscious and the carriage of the verse more urban than anything in the sonnet about the mouse’s nest, and it would therefore have been more acceptable to his first reading public. Naturally enough, his 1820 volume of Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery was influenced by the modes of landscape writing established by Goldsmith and Thomson and Gray and Collins. In order to cross the line from his unwriting self to his writing identity, Clare had to proceed upon the moving stair of those styles which were the current styles. An early poem to his native village of Helpston, for example, speaks with the unmistakable accents of Goldsmith’s Deserted Village:
Hail humble Helpstone where thy valies spread
And thy mean village lifts its lowly head
Unknown to grandeur and unknown to fame
No minstrel boasting to advance thy name
and so on. And here is another passage, again taken from ‘Shadows of Taste’, which reveals him as an equally resourceful mimic when it comes to projecting the voice of Alexander Pope:
Styles with fashions vary – tawdry chaste
Have had their votaries which each fancied taste
From Donns old homely gold whose broken feet
Jostles the readers patience from its seat
To Popes smooth rhymes that regularly play
In music stated periods all the way
That starts and closes starts again and times
Its tuning gammut true as minster chimes
From those old fashions stranger metres flow
Half prose half verse that stagger as they go
One line starts smooth and then for room perplext
Elbows along and knocks against the next
And half its neighbour where a pause marks time
There the clause ends what follows is for rhyme
This is really laid-back stuff. For all his reputation as a peasant poet, Clare had mastered the repertoire of prescribed styles and skills: nowadays a poet as capable and informed as this would probably be headhunted to teach a graduate workshop in versification. The point is, however, that Clare’s later, less conventionally correct and less (so to speak) tasteful forays into poetic utterance should really be understood as the redress of poetry in the third sense in which I used the term in my inaugural lecture. This was a sense that came from the chase, where ‘to redress’ meant to bring the hounds or the deer back to the proper course, and I associated this meaning of the term with the breakout of innate capacity which marks all true lyric activity.
The excitement of finding oneself suddenly at full tilt on the right path, of having picked up a scent and hit the trail, this kind of sprinting, hurdling joy manifests itself in scores of sonnets and short poems of exclamatory observation which Clare wrote all through his life, but especially in the 1820s and 1830s. And this is the part of his work I am singling out for special praise. Which is not to say that I want to d
ecry the full-dress correctness of other writings by him. The combination of realism, moralism and metrical efficiency when he is on his best Augustan behaviour has to be saluted. These more sententious poems show Clare at work under the influence of the poetry-speak current in England in his day; it would have taken a talent, indeed, as educated and overbearing as Joyce’s to have resisted the orthodoxies then governing nature writing. Some of these were famously expressed in a letter to Clare from his publisher, John Taylor. Taylor was being neither exploitative nor insensitive, but simply acting as a mouthpiece for received ideas about correct poetic behaviour, when he urged Clare to ‘raise his view’ and ‘speak of the Appearances of Nature … more philosophically’. But this is not the writing of Clare’s which has worn best. Its excellence is, as I say, characteristic of its time; it moves fluently and adequately but it moves like water that flows over a mill-wheel without turning it.
On the other hand, the poems of Clare’s that still make a catch in the breath and establish a positively bodily hold upon the reader are those in which the wheel of total recognition has been turned. At their most effective, Clare’s pentameters engage not just the mechanical gears of a metre: at their most effective, they take hold also on the sprockets of our creatureliness. By which I only mean that on occasion a reader simply cannot help responding with immediate recognition to the pell-mell succession of vividly accurate impressions. No one of these is extraordinary in itself, nor is the resulting poem in any way spectacular. What distinguishes it is an unspectacular joy and totally alert love for the one-thing-after-anotherness of the world. Here, by way of illustration, is another one of Clare’s sonnets in couplets – perhaps we should call them supplets – picked almost at random from the ones Clare wrote at Northborough during his early and middle forties:
Finders Keepers Page 32