[In the following essay, critic Johanne Clare examines several of John Clare's “enclosure elegies,” those poems of social protest and lamentation regarding the effects of enclosure on the landscape and its people.]

In his excellent account of the enclosure of Clare's native village, John Barrell has concluded that there is simply not enough evidence to allow us to know for certain whether the landless labourers of Helpston became poorer as a consequence of the enclosure.¹ Of course, even if such evidence existed, we would have to be wary of assuming that we have in our grasp the real historical situation against which to verify the content of Clare's enclosure elegies. Not all of the elegies take Helpston for their setting, though there is definitely a local emphasis in several of them—most notably in “The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters” and “The Lament of Swordy Well.” But in writing even these most local poems, Clare may have been thinking not only of the rural labouring poor of Helpston, but of those in other villages, or in all the villages, which had undergone the same process. It may have been a wider scene and a more general reality—the alienation of a whole class and not merely the changes in one locality—that Clare was seeking to reflect.²

We should recognize too that the elegies do not focus upon the measurable economic effects of enclosure upon the rural labourers, but rather upon the losses they sustained in the immeasurable qualities of personal happiness, dignity, creativity, and freedom. Thus, knowing for certain whether or not the poor of Helpston really became poorer after the enclosure will not deepen our appreciation of the historical importance of the elegies. Such knowledge might, however, offer some explanation as to why Clare did not write more often and more specifically about the connection between enclosure and increasing economic deprivation. Barrell has raised the possibility that Clare did not write more fully about this connection because it did not exist to be written about.³ (Barrell suggests further that in the very few poems in which Clare in fact does imply that the rural labourer was impoverished by enclosure, he was merely following literary and political conventions.) But it is just as likely that such a connection between the enclosure of his village and the poverty of his peers did exist, and that Clare deliberately chose to ignore it because he did not want to threaten his most important argument against “curst improvement” in general and “vile enclosure” in particular: his belief that they had to be resisted because they created a dispensation in which economic values were allowed to prevail over all others. Had he conveyed the impression that he opposed enclosure primarily because it made his class poorer, he would have put in jeopardy the critical integrity of his whole case against the extreme economism of the enclosing class.

Clare's opposition to enclosure was most definitely a moral opposition. He invariably depicted the rural labouring poor as innocent victims—and innocent victims are usually justified in feeling morally superior to their victimizers. But the fact that his class had been victimized by (in Clare's characteristic terms) “spoilers,” “destroyers,” “philistines,” and “knaves” explains only part of the reason he felt justified in taking a high moral tone in inveighing against improvers. In the first place, there was the question of their appalling motives. Though Clare was hesitant to focus upon the economic consequences of enclosure for his class, he was more than willing to pinpoint the economic motivations—in a word, the greed—of those who initiated and profited from the process. Any one of the elegies might serve to show that he saw enclosure as a manifestation of the acquisitive values of the master class, visible proof that the men who owned or managed the rural means of production wanted to

                    glut their vile unsatiated maws
And freedoms birthright from the weak devours

(JCOA [John Clare], 98)

In the second place, there was the obvious evidence of the encloser's refusal to acknowledge any relationship between man and nature which was not predicated upon possession. To Clare, the inhumanity of the master class was nowhere more apparent than in the “lawless laws” it enacted to set its coercive and possessive rights to the land over what he deemed the more just and noble rights to access which the labourers had inherited as their birthright, earned through their work, and secured through their profound feelings of local attachment. This was not only a question of rights but of values, of whether the providential generosity of nature was to be used by the “thousands” or possessed by the “few”; and it was a question to which the encloser had given the wrong answer by claiming possession of the wastes and commons and ancient footpaths, areas which Clare felt no single person or group had a right to own:

                                                            the rude philistines thrall
Is laid upon them and destroyed them all
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine

(JCOA, 169)

Finally, closely related to the sordid avarice of the encloser, but distinct from it, was his inability to recognize any reality which did not fit the shape of his own reductive, reified consciousness:

Green paddocks have but little charms
With gain the merchandise of farms
And muse and marvel where we may
Gain mars the landscape every day

(JCOA, 240)

Blind to the immense variety of interactions in which man with his capacity for aesthetic and spiritual experience could be involved, incapable of seeing the natural landscape as more than an economic resource to be possessed and exploited, the encloser had declared himself the enemy of everything in the realm of nature and society—ancient trees and ancient customs—which couldn’t turn a profit:

Inclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain
It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill

(JCOA, 260)

It should be clear from the lines I have quoted that invective figures significantly in everything Clare wrote about enclosure, and though I believe he wrote better poetry and ultimately better served the cause of dissent when he stopped inveighing against the values of the enclosing class and focused upon the kinds of human suffering it created, the invective is important for what it reveals of Clare's attitude towards that class: he may have feared its strategies, but he despised its morality. His sense of enclosure as a historical episode in which two sets of values clashed as violently as two classes of men gives to the elegies a radical significance which transcends the immediate object of their protest. But the specific effects of enclosure upon the well-being of his class remain very much at the centre of the poems and are in no sense obscured by Clare's more generalized pronouncements upon the morality of men “with plenty blest / So ankering after more” (JCOA, 23). Clare was particularly sensitive to the feelings of inefficacy and alienation suffered by the rural labourer when he lost his customary rights of access to the wastes and commons, and the most effective passages of the elegies are those in which he writes about such feelings and brings us close to the experience of people who must spend their lives working on the land but are made to feel that they do not belong in it save as the hired and managed labour of “them that own’d the field” (JCOA, 23). He believed that such an experience was akin to, perhaps even worse than, slavery. For whereas the man born into slavery had never known freedom nor possessed rights and customs to protect him from the cruelty of his masters, the labourer had known “freedom's birthright” and been forced to watch helplessly as it was taken from him:

                    O England! boasted land of liberty,
                    With strangers still thou mayst thy title own,
                    But thy poor slaves the alteration see,
                    With many a loss to them the truth is known:
                    Like emigrating bird thy freedom's flown,
                    While mongrel clowns, low as their rooting plough,
                    Disdain thy laws to put in force their own;
                    And every village owns its tyrants now,
And parish-slaves must live as parish-kings allow.

([The Poems of John Clare vol. 1], 157)

Labourers as slaves, enclosers as vile invaders, Napoleonic tyrants, imperial Turks: through this characteristic pattern of imagery Clare conveyed his belief that enclosure was a betrayal not only of his class, but of the character of the nation as a whole.⁴

“The Mores,” written sometime in the early 1820s, provides an excellent example of the complexity and delicacy of Clare's understanding of what that betrayal involved. The poem is rich in the sort of natural observation for which Clare is famous: in painterly detail it describes the immense proportions and sweeping contours of the unenclosed landscape, and special attention is paid to the rich colours of the wild scenery—white daisies, yellow cowslips, red fallow fields, blue mists, and “uncheckt shadows of green, brown and grey.” Yet these details, beautiful as they are, are in a sense only manifestations of what Clare found most beautiful about the unenclosed moor: nobody had claimed it for personal profit. This landscape, whose beauty had depended upon its “unbounded freedom,” is then specifically related to the experience of the labourer before enclosure, and each descriptive detail presses the reader to infer that a landscape free of the “fence of ownership” was at once the cause and the sign of the labourer's sense of freedom:

Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky …
Cows went and came with evening morn and night
To the wild pasture as their common right
And sheep unfolded with the rising sun
Heard the swains shout and felt their freedom won
Tracked the red fallow field and heath and plain
Then met the brook and drank and roamed again
The brook that dribbled on as clear as glass
Beneath the roots they hid among the grass
While the glad shepherd traced their tracks along
Free as the lark and happy as her song

(JCOA, 167-8)

The central argument of the poem is conveyed through the deliberate confounding of topographical and emotional realities: what was seen is what was felt. As long as part of the landscape remained free of the “hated sign” of the private owner Clare was able to feel that the power of the master class was not ubiquitous, and to feel this was to live without fear and with a sense of efficacy and belonging, spontaneity and hope. But once the grid of private ownership was everywhere imposed, these positive convictions could no longer be held.

                                        a hope that blossomed free
And hath been once no more shall ever be
Inclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labours rights and left the poor a slave
And memorys pride ere want to wealth did bow
Is both the shadow and the substance now …
Moors loosing from the sight far smooth and blea
Where swopt the plover in its pleasure free
Are vanished now with commons wild and gay
As poets visions of lifes early day …
And sky bound mores in mangled garbs are left
Like mighty giants of their limbs bereft
Fence now meets fence in owners little bounds
Of field and meadow large as garden grounds
In little parcels little minds to please
With men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease

(JCOA, 168)

The phrase “ill at ease” may seem rather anticlimactic after the rhetorical force of the word “imprisoned,” but this mixture of harsh, polemical words and terms sensitive to small and subtle ranges of feeling is characteristic of Clare and well suited to convey the quality of his insight into the meaning of freedom. For him freedom was both a reality and a “sweet vision” of human potentialities not yet realized, a “substance” based upon the historical rights of the labourer and a “shadow” in which the labourer could hope for new and better possibilities for himself. It was the substance which protected him from utter destitution, but it was the shadow that allowed him to feel like a free man in a free country.

Whether Clare wrote of life before enclosure or after, a social order and the labourer's experience within that order were always implicated in the landscapes he described. “The Mores” offers a clear example of the interconnectedness of Clare's topographical and social concerns; but this is a constant and obvious feature of all the elegies—indeed, to my mind, so constant and so obvious a feature that I find myself in sharp disagreement with critics who have implied that Clare's anxiety about what enclosure was doing to his local landscape far outweighed and even conflicted with his solicitude for what was being done to the labourer. As examples of this tendency, I can cite: Joanna Rapf who has suggested that Clare resisted enclosure for aesthetic rather than social reasons;⁵ Kenneth MacLean who has claimed that in writing so often about the way enclosure changed the landscape, Clare chose “to mourn the plumage and forget the dying bird”;⁶ and, at a more extended level of argument, John Barrell, who has praised the loco-descriptive aspects of the elegies but finds their social criticism confusing and inadequate.⁷ MacLean, in particular, concerned himself with Clare's failure to insist upon the causal connections between enclosure and increasing poverty, but has expressed this concern in terms which are, I believe, too broad and inevitably misleading. The absence of developed economic argument in the elegies does not justify the conclusion that Clare was indifferent to the social consequences of enclosure, and the notion that he was so obsessed by the purely topographical consequences that he “forgot” the human constituency of his protest simply does not bear up beside the evidence of the texts.

To be sure, he was obsessed by the way enclosure changed the face of the landscape and threatened the wild occupiers of the land. One sees evidence of this obsession everywhere: in “The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters,” for instance, when Clare responds so angrily to the sight of the once open fields now “all beset wi posts and rails / And turned upside down” (JCOA, 21), or in “The Lament of Swordy Well” when he has the personified land so plaintively beg the enclosers to “leave me as I am” (JCOA, 152), or again in “Helpston Green” where his indictment of enclosers is presented in the form of a casualty list of all they have destroyed:

Not tree's alone have felt their force
          Whole woods beneath them bow’d
They stopt the winding runlets course
          And flowrey pastures plough’d
To shrub or tree throughout thy fields
          They no compasion show
The uplifted axe no mercy yields
          But strikes a fatal blow

(JCOA, 62)

But many of the natural objects and scenes described in the elegies are invested with a human subjectivity of response which invites one to suspect that they signify more than physical nature. Certainly something more than the topographical consequences of enclosure pressed Clare to write in “The Mores” of the “bondage” which the “fence of ownership” had imposed upon the land, in “A Favourite Nook Destroyed” of the “poor outcast refugees of mother earth” whose lives had been disrupted by the “vile invasions of encroaching men” ([The Poems of John Clare, vol. 1], 531), and in “Remembrances” of the “little homeless miners” (moles) who had been driven from their homes and trapped “as traitors” to the new regime of the encloser:

                    I see the little mouldywharps hang sweeing
to the wind
On the only aged willow that in all the field remains
And nature hides her face while theyre sweeing in their chains
And in a silent mumuring complains

(JCOA, 259)

These images of suffering nature bring us into sympathetic contact with a local landscape, but they also take us into a political range of reference; in confronting them one's mind is thrown back to types of human suffering, specifically to the alienation, displacement, and oppression of the men and women for whom Clare spoke.⁸

I do not wish to give the impression that beneath every fallen tree in the elegies there lies the body of an exploited field-hand and in every bird's throat the cry of a dispossessed cottager. Not every scene and object in these poems invites symbolic interpretation, and I would be misrepresenting both the poems and the quality of Clare's resistance to enclosure if I were to imply that his natural imagery was merely functional—there only to symbolize or provide the settings for historical events and personal meditations. Long before it became fashionable to do so, Clare warned against the tragic consequences of a mode of production which violated the life-rhythms of natural species and destroyed the ecological balance and unity of a given region. There was an ecological specificity to his concern when he characterized the enclosed landscape through the imagery of starving birds, homeless animals, dying wildflowers, felled trees, and broken fields. And yet, in spite of this specific concern, in spite of the fact that in a quantitative sense they are taken up by line after line of natural description, the elegies resist easy classification as landscape poems or nature lyrics. If they are to be classified, it must be as poems of protest in which the social reasons, the social object, and the social constituency of the protest are clearly defined. I press this point because, I suspect, the mistaken assumption that they are simply landscape poems (with glancing historical allusions) has allowed for the even more mistaken idea that Clare cared more about the face of the landscape than the fate of his peers. In the end, whether Clare cared more about one or the other, whether his reasons for resisting enclosure were social or aesthetic, and whether his images are opaquely topographical or transparently political are questions which can and should be occluded by the recognition that the elegies are about the correspondence between a topographical and political order, about the relationship between the labourer and the land, and about the way a social process could intrude upon aesthetic experience.

The unity of Clare's concerns goes a long way towards explaining why the figure of prosopopeia, which he rarely used in his nature poetry, appears so often in the elegies. In the identification of the labourer and the land through the suffering they shared at the hands of a common enemy Clare found the theme which organized all his responses to enclosure, and in prosopopeia he found the figure to convey this theme. By writing poems in which in his own character as one of the beleaguered rural labouring poor he imagines hearing the “grievous murmurs” of a personified landscape despoiled by enclosure, he was able to portray with remarkable economy this communion of suffering, and by having his eloquent trees and accusant river-banks speak for his people, he gave ironic emphasis to his belief that too few human voices were raised in defence of the rights and needs of labour. As we can see in “The Lament of Swordy Well” (1821-4), the ascription of human feelings and moral attributes to nature had the additional virtue of ironically underscoring the inhumanity of the enclosing class. This compressed and angular poem is a dramatic monologue spoken by a personified section of the landscape which has recently been “improved”; that the land and the labourer have gained nothing from the improvement is its theme:

Im swordy well a piece of land
Thats fell upon the town
Who worked me till I couldnt stand
And crush me now Im down
…
Alas dependance thou’rt a brute
Want only understands
His feelings wither branch and root
That falls in parish hands.

(JCOA, 147-8)

The colloquial idiom and the priorities are clearly those of the workingman. (The economic emphasis is unusual, and though Clare in his own character as labourer makes no appearance in the poem, it’s worth recalling that his father mended roads until he “couldn’t stand” and then, crippled by rheumatism and destitute, was forced to “fall in parish hands.”) The indirection of the central conceit does not obscure the feelings of anger and betrayal which lie at the heart of the poem; rather, it enabled Clare to express those feelings in a particularly tough and abrasive way. Thus while the land carries the character of humanity, the “mongrel men” responsible for its enclosure are reduced to their inhumane motivations through metaphor and personified abstraction:

Yet worried with a greedy pack
They rend and delve and tear
The very grass from off my back
Ive scarce a rag to wear
…
And should the price of grain get high
Lord help and keep it low
I shant possess a single flye
Or get a weed to grow
I shant possess a yard of ground
To bid a mouse to thrive
For gain has put me in a pound
I scarce can keep alive

(JCOA, 150-1)

The figure of prosopopeia—and the whole situation it summons up of a rustic poet finding nature more humane than society—is turned to similar effect in an earlier work, “The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters” (1818). As its title suggests this poem resembles “The Lament of Swordy Well,” but here the personification—in this case, of the “genius” of a brook that has been destroyed—is more formally managed: whereas the brusque and colloquial Swordy Well speaks as a labourer, the more linguistically decorous spirit of Round-Oak Waters speaks on behalf of the labourer; and whereas the former boldly introduces itself (“Im swordy well a piece of land …”), the latter is introduced to us by the poet. Because Clare first appears, lamenting his lot as a “shunned son of Poverty,” the reader is provided with an immediate human context in which to place the dramatic monologue of Round-Oak Waters. At first, the predominant mood of the monologue is one of resigned suffering and nostalgic longing for a past in which the mutuality of the labourer and the land has been based upon more than a shared sense of betrayal. But towards the end, a note of hot recrimination cuts through this mood as Round-Oak Waters registers the changes which enclosure has brought about:

O then what trees my banks did crown
          What Willows flourishd here
Hard as the ax that Cut them down
          The senceless wretches were
‘But sweating slaves I do not blame
          Those slaves by wealth decreed
No I should hurt their harmless name
          To brand ’em wi’ the deed
Altho their aching hands did wield
          The axe that gave the blow
Yet ’t’was not them that own’d the field
          Nor plan’d its overthrow
‘No no the foes that hurt my field
          Hurts these poor moilers too
And thy own bosom knows and feels
          Enough to prove it true
…
‘Ah cruel foes with plenty blest
          So ankering after more
To lay the greens and pastures waste
          Which proffited before

(JCOA, 23)

Had it been possible for Clare to publish this poem, the passage above, with its invective and its ironical play upon the catchwords of the improver (“plan’d” and “proffited”) would have earned him the reputation of a radical. It was, he believed, a sign of the whole moral perversity of the enclosing class that it not only destroyed the labourer's access to the land, but made him act as the agent of the very process that victimized him, since, perforce, the labourer and not the property-owner had to do the actual work of draining, levelling, and fencing the old landscape.

But if “The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters” deserves a place in the tradition of dissent, it is not only for its direct denunciations, but for the way it characterizes the rural labouring poor as people who think and feel and have been cast out of the landscape in which their culture is grounded. The spirit of Round-Oak Waters reminds the poet of the ranges of experience and quality of feeling which had been possible before enclosure:

How pleasures lately flourish’d here
          Thy self has often seen
The willows waving wi’ the wind
          And here and there a thorn
Did please thy Mellancholly mind
          And did My banks adorn
‘And here the shepherd with his sheep
          And with his lovley maid
Together where these waters creep
          In loitering dalliance play’d
And here the Cowboy lov’d to sit
          And plate his rushy thongs
And dabble in the fancied pit
          And chase the Minnow throngs
‘There didst thou joy and love to sit
          The briars and brakes among
To exercise thy infant wit
          In fancied tale or song
And there the inscect and the flower
          Would Court thy curious eye
To muse in wonder on that power
          Which dwells above the sky
‘But now alas my charms are done
          For shepherds and for thee
The Cowboys with his Green is gone
          And every Bush and tree

(JCOA, 20-1)

The insistently repeated adverbs of place convey the immediacy and the tangibility of the villagers' losses: “here” the rustic poet could exercise his imagination and curiosity; “there” the shepherd could choose freely the shape of his own contentment. An historian might complain that, however catastrophic enclosure was for the common labourer, life in an open-field parish was hardly the paradise of liberty and song depicted in these lines. But it should be clear by now that the historical and, needless to say, literary significance of the elegies rests upon how vividly they express a particular consciousness of loss, and not upon whether they describe the socio-economic conditions of the rural labouring poor in a way that can verify or be verified by what is known statistically of these conditions.

It may be useful to anticipate another complaint that could be made of “Round-Oak Waters” (and of the elegies in general), for some readers may feel that Clare squandered the urgency of his protest by focusing upon the lost aesthetic pleasures of labouring life before enclosure. One might ask, for instance, in what rank in the scale of human suffering are we to place people (whatever their rank in society) who have lost their customary pleasures? If this is what access to the land really meant to the labouring poor—places where they could loiter in the grass, dally with their lovers, and chase minnows in a stream—then how tragic was the loss of this access? Certainly the relationship between the rustic and the land depicted in “Round-Oak Waters” seems lacking in the profundity which characterizes the same relationship as it is depicted in the Lyrical Ballads. One thinks in particular of “Michael,” in which a georgic celebration of work, a catalogue of passions and heroic acts, and a theory of association are offered to explain Michael's feelings for his land. Yet it’s important to notice that even in the profound idiom of Wordsworth the emphasis falls upon the rustic's right to find pleasure in life:

Those fields, those hills—what could they less? had laid
Strong hold on his affections, were to him
A pleasurable feeling of blind love,
The pleasure which there is in life itself.(9)

There is, of course, little to be gained by comparing the intrinsic merits of one of Wordsworth's greatest poems and one of Clare's earliest—especially if the criterion for comparison is profundity. But I would suggest that in spite of their obvious differences of quality and emphasis “Michael” and “Round-Oak Waters” are founded upon a common recognition: that the relationship between the rustic and his local landscape had a precious shape and meaning which far transcended the reasons of necessity or utility. Clare might write of his neighbours taking their pleasure by a country stream, Wordsworth of a shepherd's “pleasurable feeling of blind love” for his patrimony, but both poems may be read as local and precise enactments of the larger and more philosophical protest which Wordsworth expressed most succinctly in his sonnet “To the Utilitarians”:

Avaunt this oeconomic rage!
What would it bring?—an iron age,
When Fact with heartless search explored
Shall be Imagination's Lord,
And sway with absolute controul
The god-like Functions of the Soul.(10)

In the end, by writing about the “dalliance” of a shepherd and his mistress, the cowboy's play, the labourer's delight in watching the unbounded freedom of the open fields, Clare was not squandering the urgency of his protest, but finding its centre. These activities were to him a living criticism of those who would transform all earthly goods into market commodities and judge all human experience by utilitarian values.

A living criticism? Rather, they were dying before his eyes. Yet we find in the elegies very little evidence of the introverted, resigned melancholy sense of an older order giving way to a new one which is so characteristic of the genre. That kind of melancholy depends upon the recognition of change and loss as inevitable and irreversible, whereas the changes and losses Clare lamented were far from inevitable. His mourning was always quickened by anger. Even when he wrote about scenes, objects, values, and customs which appeared to have been irrevocably destroyed by enclosure (“all plough’d and buried now, as though there naught had been,” ([The Poems of John Clare, vol. 1], 161), he wrote with a dissenter's optimism, hoping that the losses would be reversed and that his poems would help push back “the vile invasions” of what Wordsworth called the “oeconomic rage” and he, “gain's rude rage” ([The Poems of John Clare, vol. 1], 124).

The informing connection between his posture as elegist and the specific content of his protest against enclosure is most carefully articulated in “To a Fallen Elm.” Written sometime in the late 1820s, this is one of the last of the enclosure elegies and one of the best. The poem breaks quite sharply into two parts—the first half is epitaphic and the last half is declamatory—but the transition between them is smoothly managed through the controlling image of the elm-tree itself and through a beautifully realized pattern of auditory imagery. The two-part structure is reminiscent of “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” and the imagery suggests that Clare shared something of Wordsworth's ability to domesticate the most sublime of feelings and to find sublimity in the habitual rhythms of ordinary experience. But if “To a Fallen Elm” suggests Clare's affinity to Wordsworth, it’s primarily because it recalls Wordsworth's tenet that in the situation of low and rustic life “the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.”¹¹ This tenet is recalled, however, in a particularly tragic and ironic way since the natural object Clare describes—and with which his own passions are “incorporated”—is beautiful but far from permanent: it has been cut down by an improver keen to turn a profit from the ground where it once took root.

The poem is shaped by specific and unconsoling recollection; here, as in all the elegies, Clare's ability to remember vividly what enclosure has effaced only intensifies his sense of loss. The importance of the elm-tree's physical presence to the emotions of the poet and his family is established in the intimate apostrophe with which the poem begins:

Old elm that murmured in our chimney top
The sweetest anthem autumn ever made
And into mellow whispering calms would drop
When showers fell on thy many coloured shade
And when dark tempests mimic thunder made
While darkness came as it would strangle light
With the black tempest of a winter night
That rocked thee like a cradle to thy root
How did I love to hear the winds upbraid
Thy strength without while all within was mute

(JCOA, 96)

The impression created here of the elm-tree as an old, affectionate friend is developed in the lines which follow. But the note of sublimity caught in the image of the dark winter storm is also amplified:

It seasoned comfort to our hearts desire
We felt thy kind protection like a friend
And pitched our chairs up closer to the fire
Enjoying comforts that was never penned
Old favourite tree thoust seen times changes lower
But change till now did never come to thee
For time beheld thee as her sacred dower
And nature claimed thee her domestic tree
Storms came and shook thee with a living power
Yet stedfast to thy home thy roots hath been
Summers of thirst parched round thy homely bower
Till earth grew iron—still thy leaves were green
The children sought thee in thy summer shade
And made their play house rings of sticks and stone
The mavis sang and felt himself alone
While in thy leaves his early nest was made
And I did feel his happiness mine own
Nought heeding that our friendship was betrayed

(JCOA, 97)

Several of the images in these passages possess the qualities of the archetype and the oxymoron. Green leaves in an iron world, darkness strangling light, silence in a storm, a violent tempest rocking the elm maternally as though it were a cradle: these images of reconciled contraries celebrate the essential unity and awesome power of nature, and press the poem into a range of reference which encompasses more than a solitary tree and a single family. But the more personal, palpable, and domestic images of the chimney-top beside the protecting tree, the chairs pulled close against the fire, the makeshift toys of the children are no less striking and no less central to the argument of the poem. The comforting ordinariness of “her domestic tree” was for Clare as important an aspect of nature's “sacred dower” as the wild sublimity of her stormy night.

I don’t wish to imply that the imagery is merely a device in the rhetorical pattern of the poem: it exists for its own sake, has its own discrete mimetic functions. But clearly it also has a rhetorical dimension and contains prescriptive as well as descriptive elements. It gives shape to Clare's perceptions and feelings about the elm-tree, its place in nature and within his domestic experience, but also allows him to express a set of convictions about man's proper relationship to nature—convictions which directly counter the creed of the improver. Against the lese-majesty of those who would fragment and dominate the landscape, Clare posits the power and unity of nature, and against the base instincts of the profit-hungry encloser, he offers the comparative nobility of his own passionate and tactful involvements. When “To a Fallen Elm” moves from description into declamation, it does so smoothly and forthrightly primarily because the images in the first part have already given imaginative assent to the arguments which follow them.

The grievances against enclosure presented in the second section of the poem are essentially the same as those in the earlier elegies, but here they are conveyed in a harsh, polemical language of unprecedented pitch. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this section involves the way it justifies its own stridency by suggesting that all forms of human communication are inevitably shaped by the world in which they are uttered. The world before enclosure, as Clare sees or rather hears it in “To a Fallen Elm,” is filled with a language—evocative, nuanced, rich in contrast—which unites the song of the mavis, the thunder and wind, the “sweetest anthem” of autumn, and the “mellow whispering” of the “music-making elm.” The elm-tree possesses no lexicon, but it knows

                              a language by which hearts are stirred
Deeper than by the atribute of words

(JCOA, 97)

Clare's sensitivity to this language is a sign of his communion with nature, and his ability to give verbal shape to the wordless euphony of nature is, to a considerable extent, the basis of his own eloquence. In the world after enclosure no such euphony and no such eloquence are possible, not only because the symbol of nature's language (and of the poet's own) has been cut down, but because this new world is so filled with the ugly, self-proclaiming cant of the enclosing class that no other forms of speech can be heard. In such a situation, Clare would have us understand, his only recourse is to put aside the gentle language of evocation and enter, with corrosive intent, into the loud and empty rhetoric of his enemies. He must listen attentively to the enclosers and their political lackeys as they speak a language less human than the language of his beloved elm-tree:

Thoust heard the knave abusing those in power
Bawl freedom loud and then oppress the free
Thoust sheltered hypocrites in many a shower
That when in power would never shelter thee
Thoust heard the knave supply his canting powers
With wrongs illusions when he wanted friends …
With axe at root he felled thee to the ground
And barked of freedom—O I hate that sound
It grows the cant term of enslaving tools
To wrong another by the name of right …
No matter—wrong was right and right was wrong
And freedoms brawl was sanction to the song
Such was thy ruin music making Elm
The rights of freedom was to injure thine
As thou wert served so would they overwhelm
In freedoms name the little that is mine

(JCOA, 97-8)

The parallelism, the repetitions, and the metrical discipline give rhetorical emphasis to this passage. The tightness of rhythm and rhyme in the final couplet (“… wrong was right and right was wrong / And freedoms brawl was sanction to the song”) and the management of the internal pauses in the last five lines is impressive. But the most striking feature is the strong and simple diction and, in particular, the variety of ways Clare uses the word “freedom.” It appears nine times in the last half of the poem and, as John Barrell has noted, Clare plays upon the different connotations of the word as it was conventionally used by the advocates of enclosure, the apologists for laissez-faire, the Tory and the Whig, in order to convey his “more than conventional response” to the term.¹² Clare well understood that those who most vociferously “barked of freedom” were only using (abusing) the word to justify the “right” (another abused term) of the few to exploit and oppress the thousands. But he continued to have faith in the word and in its power to assert its true meaning even within the discourse of those who tried to preempt its meaning. When the encloser spoke of “freedom” or “liberty” or “rights” in order to give “sanction to the song” of his greed and self-interest, he stood condemned by his own words.

The fact that “To a Fallen Elm” turns upon the issue of human language and nature's euphony reminds us that Clare's responses to enclosure were shaped not only by his experiences as a labourer but by his acute consciousness of his identity and resources as a poet. It is interesting to note that the parliamentary statute for the enclosure of his village was enacted in 1809—the same year in which he wrote “Helpstone,” his first extant poem—and the final Award was published by the commissioners of enclosure in 1820—the year his first volume was published. The coincidence of these dates may not have held a special significance for Clare since most of the actual work of enclosing Helpston probably occurred between 1811 and 1816.¹³ But the coincidence reminds us that during the very years Clare was learning to write about his local landscape, organizing his perceptions, and sounding the depths of his own feelings of local attachment, the landscape was taken from him. It may not have been transformed beyond recognition, but because his perceptions were so fine and because he was so concerned (even as a young man) to trace the line of continuity in his life, the most subtle changes caused by enclosure affected him dramatically; his world was turned, in his words, “upside down” and “inside out” at the very time that it began to mean so much to him as a poet. Moreover, because, like Wordsworth, Clare placed such great value upon the visions and experiences of his childhood, enclosure seemed to represent a special threat to the future poems he wanted to write: the scenes of his childhood epiphanies were no longer there to return to.

In “The Village Minstrel” Clare took pains to emphasize the harmful effects of enclosure upon the creative aspirations of Lubin, the young rustic hero of the poem and Clare's surrogate:

                    But who can tell the anguish of his mind,
                    When reformation's formidable foes
                    When civil wars ’gainst nature's peace
combin’d,
                    And desolation struck her deadly blows,
                    As curst improvement ’gan his fields inclose;
                    O greens, and fields, and trees, farewell, farewell!
                    His heart-wrung pains, his unavailing woes
                    No words can utter, and no tongue can tell,
When ploughs destroy’d the green, when groves of willows fell.

[The Poems of John Clare, vol. 1], 155)

In may respects, Lubin is a representative figure and his grievances against enclosure are typical of his class. But the hero of “The Village Minstrel” also has a starring role to play as an aspirant poet, a solitary character, sharply individuated, who hates enclosure for reasons which depend specifically upon his literary life. Lubin had been preparing to write about the unbounded freedom of the open fields and untamed wastes, but enclosure has destroyed what he was going to write about, and we are meant to understand that this loss has almost silenced him (“No words can utter, and no tongue can tell …”). Obviously Lubin's creator was not silenced by the effects of enclosure upon his imagination, but he was, nonetheless, seized by the idea that the enclosure of his village had irreparably altered the course of his development as a poet. Thus, in “To a Fallen Elm,” the lament of the cottager for his lost domestic happiness is confluent with the dejection of the poet who has had the tutor of his eloquence stolen from him. Thus, in “The Mores,” Clare vilifies the enclosing class not only for trampling upon “the grave of labour's rights” but for impinging upon the “poets visions of lifes early day.”

Most of the references to his specific character as a literary man are very brief, but all of the elegies indicate that Clare confronted the effects of enclosure with a kind of hostility he could not entirely share with his rustic neighbours, not because they did not suffer the same aesthetic and emotional losses but because they did not suffer as poets. In “Round-Oak Waters,” Clare presents himself as a victim of poverty and oppression. But he is also a young man with literary aspirations of which “the worlds made gamely sport and scorn” and because of these aspirations he has fears and doubts, pleasures and interests, which set him apart from his peers:

And different pleasures fill’d thy breast
                              And different thy employ
And different feelings thou possest
                              From any other Boy

(JCOA, 20)

In his discussion of the poem Barrell has suggested that Clare's emphasis upon his differentness and his lament for the social consequences of enclosure split “Round-Oak Waters” into two separate strands of meaning, and that these strands are not only unconnected but contradictory since Clare protests on behalf of a collectivity from which he takes pains to separate himself.¹⁴ It is true that Clare often tried to have it both ways, wanted to be taken as both a choric and lyric poet. But in drawing attention to the poetical cast of his mind and aspirations Clare was not separating himself from the rural labouring poor; he was distinguishing himself within their collectivity. In all of the elegies, in “Round-Oak Waters” most of all, his need to proclaim his special interests and private sufferings as a poet did not conflict with his wish to make a direct political statement against enclosure on behalf of his class. The melancholy of the young poet obsessed with the problem of finding his subject was not simply contiguous but integrally connected to the outrage of the labouring man who was also struggling to be heard: enclosure was the cause of both feelings.

Clare was not always at one with his fellow-villagers—his solitude was dear to him—but he was one of them, and the political authority and urgency of the elegies depends upon the fact that their author was a member of the constituency of his protest, himself one of the “thousand,” “a shunned son” of his society, “a poor moiler,” a beneficiary of “labour's rights” before enclosure, and after it, a “parish-slave by wealth decreed.” The act of writing, and the attendant work of poetic self-definition, did not erase that sense of shared identity, only brought it into closer focus. Because of his social experience, Clare was especially susceptible to the mystique of the alienated poet in a heartless world, and he sometimes wrote of the sphere of poetry as though it were a perfect haven, immune to the infections of society and innocent of its cruelties. But the active relations into which he entered as a working poet—with the language, the literary tradition, and the reading public—constantly brought him back to imperfect reality. As we shall see in the following chapter, there were elements within the poetic tradition which seemed as threatening to Clare's creative and emotional resources as the “vile invasions” of enclosure. Indeed, he had to struggle against the articulated values of the literary community he so admired as arduously and constantly as he struggled against the enclosers he so despised. The two struggles were of a different nature and took a different form, but both exercised Clare's capacity for protest, and in both the question of his social identity was of overwhelming importance.

Notes

1. Barrell, [The Idea of Landscape] 215. For a full account of the enclosure of Helpston and its economic consequences see 98-110 and 189-215.

2. The fact that the parish of Maxey to the north and Etton, Glinton, Northborough, and Peakirk to the east were enclosed at the same time as Helpston would have contributed to Clare's feeling that enclosure was sweeping across the whole countryside. Indeed three-quarters of the nation's four thousand parliamentary enclosures occurred in two periods, first in the 1760s and 1770s, and then during the war period from 1793 to 1815, and in these two periods about one half of the land of Huntingdonshire, Leicester, and Northamptonshire was enclosed. See Hobsbawm and Rude, Captain Swing, 27, and Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 80.

   In his poems, letters, and prose Clare does not mention any parliamentary enclosures other than Helpston's; yet we should not suppose that he did not know of them. He may well have learned about them at the Blue Bell tavern where he drank his beer, or in Stamford where he bought his books, or at Milton Park where he visited frequently with those two well-informed men. Artis and Henderson, or he might have learned of them through the many newspapers that he read so intently. (He took The Stamford Mercury, The Essex Herald, and The Examiner; he read The Times and Cobbett's Political Register and had access to other regional papers.) Since he passed his formative years in one of the counties (and next to another) which experienced one of the most intense periods of enclosure, it is probable that Clare had a general knowledge of enclosure and a specific knowledge of other enclosed villages, and that in articulating his protest against improvement he was dovetailing that knowledge into his local poems.

3. Barrell, 194-202.

4. The idea that England was being betrayed from within by a new polity (which allowed for enclosures, rack-renting, poor-houses, inequitable taxation, and corruption in the courts) is also developed in “England, 1830” ([The Poems of John Clare, vol. 2], 117) and The Parish, in which the henchmen of the new order are characterized as “turks imperial of the woodland bough” (l. 2114).

5. Joanna E. Rapf, review of Barrell, The Idea of Landscape, and Tibble, John Clare, 80.

6. MacLean, Agrarian Age, 47.

7. Barrell, 110-16, 175, and 198-202.

8. Though in principle Clare had no sympathy for mobs and mob-violence, “Remembrances” (1832) provides some evidence that he was sympathetic to the labourers who rioted and set fires in the disturbances of 1830—and then were imprisoned, transported, or hanged. In the poem it is “mouldywharps” and not labourers who are exiled or executed “as traitors,” but the form of their suffering recalls the harsh punishments handed down by the Special Commission which tried the followers of Captain Swing. Though there are no specific references to Captain Swing in Clare's published writings, he must have known what was happening in his own vicinity: the machine-breaking riots spread into the Soke of Peterborough, occurring at Oundle and southeast of Kettering. See Hobsbawm and Rude, 146-8.

9. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 2:83.

10. Ibid., 4:388.

11. Ibid., 2:387.

12. Barrell, 200.

13. Ibid., 106.

14. Ibid., 116.