of enclosure could not be as easily ignored as could the uncongenial advice of publishers and friends.

The pastoral tradition historically offered two basic answers to the questions raised by an unsatisfactory present state of affairs. A poet could paint an idealized picture of life in the countryside and show it to be free of the corruption, exploitation and moral decay that resided of course in the city or court. If the countryside should fall upon hard times, as it does in The Deserted Village, one can show that the causes were the city-bred vices of luxury and mercantile greed. The other traditional answer was to devise a means of avoiding bad times by an escape to a safe haven. The barely accessible valley in which Michael lives is just such a means of avoidance, although it is one that does not endure beyond the lifetime of Wordsworth's shepherd-hero. And of course the temptation that besets and overcomes Luke, as well as all Michael's troubles, come from outside Grasmere Vale.

Neither of these alternatives figures significantly in The Shepherd's Calendar. There is nothing of the city-country motif in the poem, and its setting is certainly no happy valley, located beyond time and the problems of enclosure. Clare was too honest, perhaps even too limited in his vision, and too much a product of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century realistic treatment of the pastoral world to create a false ideal of rural life. But he was also too much distressed by the state of post-enclosure Helpston not to seek relief from his disappointment. The one escape that Clare allows his speaker—and that infrequently—is an escape into childhood and the past of custom and tradition.

The relief that The Shepherd's Calendar offers, from a difficult life and ultimately from reality, is an escape not from a place but from time. Clare had no real desire to leave his native village and, in fact, drew upon its sights and sounds as the raw material at least of most of his preasylum poetry. So he turned to a time that he could look back on as better than the present. But even to speak of time in regard to a poem that claims an affinity with the pastoral tradition is to suggest that the genre's notion of timelessness had become more complex than early English pastoralism had allowed it to be. And so it had. We normally think of time as a thing of inexorable motion, a thing which, along with the tide, waits for no one. But pastoral time conventionally embodied an eternal present—no time and all time. It assured that the season was always spring and that shepherds and shepherdesses were perpetually young and had fallen in love only a few moments ago. Pastoral time could not be represented as a river or a line, but as a point, a unity, and if divisions were allowed to exist, they were like degrees on the circumference of a circle. Applied to the rural world, the notion of timelessness also had reference to certain values of life, like a simplicity of existence, innocence and a feeling of community, and to the idea that rural but not urban life had retained these values, changing little since the memory of man.

Of course, realistically, rural life was fundamentally concerned with time, much more so than urban life. The merchant, clerk or artisan could ply his trade in the city almost regardless of the time of day or the season of the year. But this was not true of the farmer, the herdsman, or even the farm labourer. What he did and when he did it depended on the time the sun rose and set, on the day of the week ('market day,' for example), but especially on the season. Each of these occurs cyclically—the days, weeks, months and seasons—and represents time as a selfrenewing phenomenon, moving through the degrees of a circle and always coming to a new beginning. The Shepherd's Calendar, almost by its title alone, suggests such a notion of time. As a pastoral, it evokes a sense of the eternal present that is pastoral time, and as a 'calendar', it represents one round of the cycle that is a year. It is ironic, then, and at the same time a great part of the interest and importance of Clare's poem that both its language and its forays into the remembered past work against the ideas of suspended and cyclical time. My aim is to explore this irony further.

As if to establish early the importance to the country man of the circumstances of each month of the year, and to introduce the whole notion of time which will play so great a role, Clare tells us, thirteen lines into the poem, how a farmer might read bankrupt lists, grain prices,

Or old moores anual prophecys
That many a theme for talk supplys
Whose almanacks thumbd pages swarm
Wi frost and snow and many a storm
And wisdom gossipd from the stars
Of politics and bloody wars
(P. 2)

[All quotations are from Clare's, The Shepherd's Calendar, ed. Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield, London, 1964. In the absence of numbered lines, page numbers follow each quotation.]

In fact, opening in January as it must, the poem plunges immediately into that season of the year when time weighs most heavily on the hands of the country man and makes its presence most keenly felt. Only then can the farmer afford to be idle. Only then can he 'behind the tavern screen / Sit—or wi elbow idly prest / On hob' (p. 1). Nearly all productive labour comes to a halt during this winter season when man and beast alike endure time's slow passage:

While in the fields the lonly plough
Enjoys its frozen sabbath now
And horses too pass time away
In leisures hungry holiday
Rubbing and lunging round the yard
Dreaming no doubt of summers sward
As near wi idle pace they draw
To brouze the upheapd cribs of straw
(p. 3)

Except for the necessary feeding of livestock and some indoor tasks like milking and threshing, little rural labour seems to be going forward in 'A Winters Day'. And yet, this first poem shares with The Shepherd's Calendar as a whole that quality which immediately strikes readers of Clare's poetry—a sense of perpetual motion. Not only is our attention directed rapidly from object to object and from scene to scene, but also each object, defined briefly and with precision in a line or two, is captured as if it too were in motion. Each living thing that momentarily attracts the speaker's attention is apprehended in the process of doing something:

The thresher first thro darkness deep
Awakes the mornings winter sleep
Scaring the owlet from her prey
Long before she dreams of day
That blinks above head on the snow
Watching the mice that squeaks below
And foddering boys sojourn again
By rhyme hung hedge and frozen plain
Shuffling thro the sinking snows
Blowing his fingers as he goes
To where the stock in bellowings hoarse
Call for their meal in dreary close
And print full many a hungry track
Round circling hedge that guards the stack
(pp. 2-3)

The absence of punctuation heightens our sense of rapid motion, but this is only a minor part of the effect of these lines. The key here is the relatively small number of copulative verbs in this verse, and the great number of verbs of action or process. At times the effect is a little like that in the children's verse about the house that Jack built—the thresher awakes the morning and scares the owl, that blinks above and watches the mice, that squeak below, and so on. Even the hedge, whose function would seem to depend on its remaining stationary, is described as an active doer, when it encircles and guards the hay stack. We leave this first part of 'January' with a sense that even in the frozen dead of winter there is a myriad of live and moving things to be seen and wondered at all around.

'A Winters Day' moves, after a brief look into the village tavern, from the view of a labourer in the pre-dawn darkness to the hurrying home at evening of all who have been abroad. In this chronological movement from morning to evening, the poem is typical of Clare's handling of the days, months and ultimately the whole year that make up The Shepherd's Calendar. On the one hand, we have a sense that the spatial pattern of each month's poem is, if not a circle, then at least a multitude of points falling within a circle. The speaker seems to be standing at some point in the centre of a rural village from which he can know what goes on around him. But he never moves out of this village circle to describe any other village or the world at large. And even within his circle, he does not lead us in a linear pattern, down a country road, for example, pointing out objects of interest as he moves along. On the other hand, there is a definite sense of time as a linear phenomenon in The Shepherd's Calendar. The poem as a whole moves from January to December, the fanner's labour moves from planting to harvest, and the days move, logically enough, from morning to night. This sense of time's movement is augmented by the overwhelming number of verbs of action which give the verse its sense of perpetual motion. The fact that no object or living thing is viewed as completely static gives each the quality of existing as 'in process'—that is, as something moving or being moved or used through a period of time, however brief. Take, for example, the owlet in the lines quoted earlier. Had Clare spoken of a bird 'That is above head on the snow', we would have been justified in imagining a stop-action photograph, a picture in one frame. But the fact that this is an owlet 'That blinks above head' imparts a sense of process to the line. The blinking of eyes, as instantaneous as the action might be, requires a series of frames, a motion picture, and ultimately the owlet is above and before us for a duration of time.

This quality of Clare's language, creative of a sense of movement through space and through time, and often both, is characteristic of The Shepherd's Calendar as a whole, but it is not, alone, what sets this poem apart from others in the pastoral tradition. After all, the characters of any pastoral have always been alive and moving, even if they only move their lips in song. What is unique about Clare's poem is the sense he conveys of life and motion in all things, including the inexorable forward motion of time. The Shepherd's Calendar in one respect is closer in character to a poem like Michael than to the conventionally timeless pastoral. Like Wordsworth's poem, it deals with the reality of the present time, and also looks back to a better time. The changes that have taken place in the interval between the present time of the speaker standing beside the unfinished sheepfold and the time when that sheep-fold represented a future hope are the essence of Michael's story and the whole poem. This could not be said of The Shepherd's Calendar. Change is hardly the poem's primary subject matter, and yet the speaker's glances backward—there are only a few—do point to a better time and in the process drive home the point that the past is indeed the past.

As early as Ά Cottage Evening', the second part of 'January', the poem leaves the present and the forward motion of time. Snug in the cottage before a crackling blaze, the evening meal finished and cleared away, the 'huswife' sits down to tell to her children once again her stock of amazing tales. Yet, as if to say that she is unwill ing to lose touch with the present reality, 'Not willing to loose time or toil / She knits or sues and talks the while' (p. 12). Her tales are of mysterious disappearances, 'witches dread powers and fairey feats'—just the sort of things to capture the innocent imaginations of children and childlike adults. With the stories 'half told', the remainder left for 'tomorrows eve', the children creep off to bed while 'faireys like to rising sparks / Swarm twittering round them in the dark' (p. 18). We have been told all of this from the vantage point of an adult, although perhaps one who enjoyed the telling as much as a child might enjoy the listening. But then Clare does something that is unusual in The Shepherd's Calendar—he becomes 'philosophical'. Perhaps he acted in response to the urging of his publishers that he should be more 'entertaining'. At any rate, the poem suddenly begins to take on the character of the self-conscious philosophising of a professional versifier, with this apostrophe to the past:

O spirit of the days gone bye
Sweet childhoods fearful extacy
The witching spells of winter nights
Where are they fled wi their delights
When listening on the corner seat
The winter evenings length to cheat
I heard my mothers memory tell
Tales superstition loves so well
Things said or sung a thousand times
In simple prose or simpler ryhmes
(p. 18)

All of a sudden we are reading a poem in the ubi sunt tradition—'Where are they fled … Ah where is page of poesy … Where are they now … To what wild dwelling … Where are they gone the joys and fears … ' The 'one withering flower' that is left to the adult, for whom reason has taken away 'childhoods visions', is that 'Memory may yet the themes repeat'. Memory is a poor substitute for the 'magic wonders' of childhood, but it is one that seems to be at least temporarily effective for the speaker. For, his poem seems to come to life again as soon as he begins to recall the tales that had once been sources of wonder to him—the frog 'turned to a king and lover too', 'the tale of Cinderella' and the 'boy that did the jiants slay'. What is more, the speaker betrays his reluctance to give up the feeling of mystery and magic these memories recall when he refuses to leave them in the past. The tales of the 'huswife' are swept aside with the speaker's insistence that the experience of adulthood has destroyed childhood innocence. No doubt, he is right, yet in the telling of what has been lost, he seems to become once again caught up in the magic of these outworn tales. He is so caught up, in fact, that instead of settling for mere titles as a means of describing the stories he remembers from his childhood, he tells us each one almost from beginning to end. He even breaks into the final tale to tell us that in the face of the 'jiants' most awful threats, his heart 'sleeps on thro fear and dread / And terrors that might wake the dead' (p. 21). And then he plunges right back into this description of the giant:

When like a tiger in the wood
He snufts and tracks the scent of blood
And vows if aught falls in his power
He'll grind their very bones to flower
(p. 21)

While insisting time and again that the past is gone forever, the speaker repeatedly refuses to let go even these momentary illusions of its return.

The old tales have not changed; nor has the child's response to them. It is the speaker himself who has changed. Time and his experience of the world have replaced the delightful fears of childhood imagination with the too real cares of everyday life. The recollection of childhood becomes, then, a nostalgic escape from the reality of the present, just as the pastoral ideal of rural life is an evasion of the reality of life as it is in the country. One might argue that any look backward and toward the simple way of life that is the pastoral ideal is really an attempt to create or recreate, however briefly, the natural feelings of a happy childhood—a lack of care and responsibility, a sense of belonging, and innocence of the complexities of reality. If these feelings are not warranted from an adult point of view, that does not really matter. The choice is finally between the innocence of the childlike mind and the harsh experiences of the adult. Suffering and cares exist whether the child is aware of them or not, just as they implicitly exist (in the city or at court) whether the shepherd of the pastoral tradition is aware of them or not.

Memory, such as that which brings back the speaker's past, reproduces a kind of innocence by simply omitting all that is painful in a child's world. In the present time, in the poem of 'August', a child's day is spent like this:

The ruddy child nursed in the lap of care
In toils rude ways to do its little share
Beside its mother poddies oer the land
Sun burnt and stooping with a weary hand
Picking its tiney glean of corn or wheat
While crackling stubbles wound its legs and feet
(p. 96)

No doubt the speaker himself as a child experienced such days in August, but his memories are only of childhood joys. As he speaks in 'A Cottage Evening' he knows now that the joys and fears he felt as a result of the magic tales of his youth were as fleeting and illusory as the fairies and giants that occasioned them. But he also knows that his brief recapturing of childhood feelings is at least a momentary stay against 'A real world and doubting mind'. Sadly, for the man who would escape the reality of the present, the difference between the joys of childhood and the joys of the pastoral ideal lies in the degree of one's awareness. Childhood cannot see beyond itself, while the creator of an ideal pastoral world (or the poet who attempts to recreate childhood's feelings) must finally come to terms with the fact that he is dealing in illusion.

Nonetheless, the speaker only very reluctantly puts aside his recollection of childhood tales. The same reluctance appears when he has the chance to speak of certain rural customs and traditions of the past. 'May', for example, naturally carries a reminder of old May Day customs, and yet today old glories are 'All fled and left thee every one' (p. 60). But Clare does not leave the subject with just this bald statement. Instead, he tells us all that has fled and left. 'No flowers are pluckt to hail the[e] now' is a line sufficient to convey a simple matter of fact, but it hardly displays the feeling the speaker has for this lost custom. So we have this:

In the same way that the speaker told us the tales of childhood had lost their magic appeal and then went on to repeat each magic tale, he now tells us that old May Day traditions are no more, and then brings them back into being:

This time, however, it is not an individual's inevitable passage from innocence to experience that has taken away some good part of the past. The enemy is called by name: 'And where enclosure has its birth / It spreads a mildew oer her mirth' (p. 61). This couplet is vaguely reminiscent of one in The Deserted Village: 'Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, / Where wealth accumulates, and men decay' (11. 51-2). But as a whole, The Shepherd's Calendar contains remarkably few references to enclosure and its effect of Helpston. For the most part, the poem seems simply to accept the present reality, and only in occasional backward glances to hint at a complaint. This is how the speaker leaves 'May':

Yet summer smiles upon thee still
Wi natures sweet unalterd will
And at thy births unworshipd hours
Fills her green lap wi swarms of flowers
To crown thee still as thou hast been
Of spring and summer months the queen
(p. 62)

As it happens, the very next month, with its account of shearing time, again brings up the subject of the changes wrought by enclosure. Old men recall past delights, and we are told of them in loving detail: the great bowl 'of frumity where yearly swum / The streaking sugar and the spotting plumb', the 'stone pitcher' and 'clouded pint horn wi its copper rim' from which 'rude healths was drank' from the 'best broach the cellar would supply' (p. 66). In fact, it is an old man who speaks sadly of a bygone past, and although his reminiscence is momentarily interrupted by the realistic demands of his task, as soon as he can he will 'wipe his brow and start his tale again' (p. 66). Here, he is very much like the poem's speaker, whose recollections of the past are broken off by the intrusions of a present reality, and yet he returns again and again to these memories he cannot easily give up. Not all of the ancient customs, however, have disappeared. There is still the opportunity for a maid 'Giving to every swain tween love and shame / Her "clipping poseys" as their yearly claim' (p. 68). But for those who remember another time, what is left is little compared to what once was, for something more important than 'ale and songs' has been lost:

And the old freedom that was living then
When masters made them merry wi their men
Whose coat was like his neighbors russet brown
And whose rude speech was vulgar as his clown
Who in the same horn drank the rest among
And joined the chorus while a labourer sung
All this is past—and soon may pass away
The time torn remnant of the holiday
As proud distinction makes a wider space
Between the genteel and the vulgar race
Then must they fade as pride oer custom showers
Its blighting mildew on her feeble flowers
(pp. 68-9)

This month's poem does not end with even the mildly positive note of 'May'. The 'proud distinction' that has grown up between the 'genteel and the vulgar race', even in this small village of Helpston, is a much more vicious result of enclosure than the consolidation of some fields and the re-routing of a few country lanes.

Clare makes his point—and it is one worth consideration—but he does not linger over it. There is the present to be lived and work to be done. The poem, from July to November, is again dominated by that sense of perpetual motion I described earlier. In fact, Clare seems to allow his speaker the luxury of pausing to look backward only when he tells of times of relative leisure for the country man or when the memory of strong rural traditions might expectedly be jolted to life. Thus it is that the past is evoked during the frozen months of January and December, during the month of May Day celebrations, and during shearing time when an old clipper has a captive audience of helpers and a host of memories. During the bustle of the harvest, for example, a country man's day is too filled with pressing tasks to permit a look to the past.

'November' is a month of mists and storms, until finally

Time's inevitable forward movement is also about to be locked in chill delay, for Christmas has come, bringing ancient traditions and memories of childhood. Labour rests from its toil, mirth beguiles care, and old customs are renewed. 'December' is, appropriately, a summing up of the rest of the year, at least with regard to the speaker's earlier thoughts on time's passage and the changes that have come about in time. The opposition of pride to simplicity that we first saw at the end of 'June' reappears to help explain the gradual loss of the old customs. And self-consciously, 'the poets song' is hailed as the preserver of the past. It is a role that is fulfilled by looking in two directions at one time, for it represents both a glance backward to the past and a record for the future. But again, Clare is more concerned to tell of ancient customs than to dwell on the fact of their passing. And so he does tell of singers and village bells, the "'Morrice danse'", the 'prentice boy' and his "'Christmass box'", and the simple mirth of friends gathering.

December is after all just the month to allow Clare to bring together his two principal ideas of the past—the past of each individual, his childhood, and the past of a society, village life before enclosure. 'December' is the natural meeting place for the joys of the child,

The wooden horse wi arching head
Drawn upon wheels around the room
The gilded coach of ginger bread
And many colord sugar plumb
Gilt coverd books for pictures sought
Or storys childhood loves to tell
Wi many a urgent promise bought
To get tomorrows lesson well
(p. 129)

and the joys of the adult,

The shepherd now no more afraid
Since custom doth the chance bestow
Starts up to kiss the giggling maid
Beneath the branch of mizzletoe …
While snows the window panes bedim
The fire curls up a sunny charm
Where creaming oer the pitchers rim
The flowering ale is set to warm
(pp. 126, 127)

The two come together in the realisation that one of the joys of adulthood is the memory of childhood joy at Christmas:

Tho mankind bids such raptures dye
And throws such toys away as vain
Yet memory loves to turn her eye
And talk such pleasures oer again
(p. 129)

But the joining of these two ideas of the past serves also to suggest that both depend on a state of mind. As in 'A Cottage Evening', the wondrous stories and the Christmas toys have not changed as much as has the man who now perceives them through an adult's eyes. It is an inevitable change that each individual experiences. But village life has also undergone a change from the past to the present time, and the fact that the Christmas season retains at least 'the shadow still of what hath been' makes the loss of other traditions throughout the year that much more poignant. Whether their day to day existence really seemed better to past generations because they had the benefit of the old customs and traditions is not a question that Clare or probably anyone can answer with much assurance. The poet can show us, however, that a man does not regret the loss of the wonder and magic of childhood quite so much when he has the simple traditions of neighbourliness and mutual good cheer to compensate for them.

Enclosure no doubt wrought physical changes in the village of Helpston. Yet it is remarkable that The Shepherd's Calendar, a poem almost passionately concerned with accurate description of the physical reality of rural life, does not speak of one such change. When Clare talks of change, it is the intangible changes and losses that he reveals—the new distinction between master and man, and the loss of the feeling for doing things as they had always been done. These changes have not come about in a place, but in time.

Ultimately, perhaps, Clare's poem has more to do with a sense of place than with a sense of time. And yet, to ignore its handling of time is, I think, to deprive the poem of one of its most profound values, both as a pastoral and as an evocation of rural life. From the point of view of time, The Shepherd's Calendar piles irony upon irony. The poem is after all a pastoral, so we think of time suspended, and a 'calendar', which sees time as cyclical and ever-renewing. Yet, ironically, its language is the language of a perpetual and forward motion, and it speaks of time's inexorable movement and the pastness of the past. And finally it is a poem, a work of art that arrests time and holds the past suspended for ever in the present.

Old customs O I love the sound
However simple they may be
What ere wi time has sanction found
Is welcome and is dear to me
Pride grows above simplicity
And spurns it from her haughty mind
And soon the poets song will be
The only refuge they can find
(p. 126)