I

Topographical poetry in the wide sense is as old as poetry itself, for poets have always felt the need to celebrate their environment, thereby giving their emotions 'a local habitation and a name.' Drayton's Poly-Olbion and Jonson's To Penshurst are important poems in this tradition. But the publication in 1642 of Sir John Denham's Cooper's Hill inaugurated a special type of topographical poem, the hill- or prospect-poem, which had its full flowering in the eighteenth century and which was, in its decline, part of the Romantic poets' inheritance. In this tradition, analogous to the pictorial tradition of the bird's-eye view, the poet climbs a hill, sweeps his eye round the panorama, focuses his attention on the most interesting prospect, and paints a careful word-picture. It did not need much of an effort for eighteenth-century minds to associate the hill in question with Parnassus, but it was also Denham who had domesticated Parnassus for them, as he makes clear in the first eight lines of Cooper's Hill:

Sure there are Poets which did never dream
Upon Parnassus, nor did tast the stream
Of Helicon, we therefore may suppose

Those made not Poets, but the Poets those.
And as Courts make not Kings, but Kings the Court,
So where the Muses & their train resort,
Parnassus stands; if I can be to thee
A Poet, thou Parnassus art to me.

The purpose of this article is to show how John Clare (1793-1864) inherits this tradition, struggles to find his own voice within it, and eventually creates a unique vision.

Topographical poetry is a branch of landscape poetry and sets out, in R.A. Aubin's words, to describe 'specifically named actual localities.' Prospect poetry is a specialized type of topographical poetry in which an extensive view is described from one or more points (or 'stations') and in which the poet draws moral or patriotic lessons from the scenery. The ambiguity in the word 'prospect' is always present—a 'prospect' is a long view both in space and in time. While Aubin sees the essential characteristics of the topographical genre as those which name and describe specific places, John Wilson Foster has attempted to define the genre more precisely. According to Foster, topographical poetry is that in which certain structural devices are employed to describe the landscape; the genre can be recognized not only by its naming and description of specific places, but by the way in which description is controlled by spatial, temporal, and moralistic designs: 'We can say broadly that topographical poetry ceases to warrant the title when the poet no longer sets up certain kinds of descriptive patterns to convey corresponding patterns of moralistic meditation.'

Foster elsewhere stresses the connection between topographical poetry and the sciences of surveying and topography. In discussing Cooper's Hill, he writes: 'The eye-shifts in "Cooper's Hill" bear a close resemblance to the way sightings were taken with these [surveyors'] instruments.' He explains in another article how enclosure became a socio-economic spur to the development of surveying. It follows that for Clare the word 'survey' carries a double threat. On the one hand, scientific surveyors were enclosing the landscape of his boyhood; on the other, topographical artists and poets 'overlooked' what made his life and landscape meaningful. The enclosure of the land around his Northamptonshire village, Helpston, began in 1809; later he recorded his reaction to surveyors at work:

Saw 3 fellows at the end of Royce Wood who I found were laying out the plan for an 'Iron railway' from Manchester to London it is to cross over Round Oak Spring by Royce Wood corner for Woodcroft Castle I little thought that fresh intrusions would interrupt & spoil my solitudes after the Enclosure they will despoil a boggy place that is famous for Orchises at Royce Wood end. [J.W. Tibble and Anne Tibble, eds, The Prose of John Clare, London, 1951, p. 151. Hereafter referred to in the text as Prose]

Enclosure, landscape-gardening on a huge scale, and the railways swept away much of that open nature whose loss Clare continually laments. The changes were carried out by a horde of surveyors, representatives of what John Barrell calls the 'rural professional class,' with little sympathy for or knowledge of Clare's way of life.

Foster's analysis of structural devices is especially applicable to the sub-genre of prospect poetry. If one rests content with Aubin's definition, the nature of Clare's resistance to the tradition is unclear; but once the connection with scientific surveying is made explicit, Clare's predicament is highlighted. It is perhaps a sense of threat, as much as genuine literary influence, which attracted Clare to landscape poetry before Denham (or outside the Denham tradition). Clare's affinities with the seventeenth century are evident from his skilful exercises, 'fathered' upon Sir Henry Wotton, Sir John Harington, Andrew Marvell, and others, grouped together by J.W. Tibble under the heading 'Poems Written in the Manner of the Older Poets,' and dated between 1824 and 1832. [J.W. Tibble, ed. The Poems of John Clare (London 1935), II, pp. 181-212. Hereafter referred to in the text as [Poems.]

Clare's approach to eighteenth-century poetry, however, was necessarily more complex. He would have noticed how optical and landscape terms had become assimilated by political and social metaphors—'viewpoint' or 'point of view' is an intellectual term; one has 'elevated' thoughts as the result of being in an 'elevated' position; one's life gains 'perspective' as well as the landscape (painted or real); one should accept one's 'walk' of life; one ought not to have ideas above one's 'station'; one's life has 'landmarks' if one 'surveys' it properly; and to 'command' bright 'prospects' is more than just having mental snapshots of the view, or 'panorama,' from an 'eminence,' preferably from a 'seat' (garden seat or family seat). Clare's problem as an artist is how to write descriptive poetry about his own landscape without recourse to this alien vocabulary.

II

If Denham's view from Cooper's Hill could be called telescopic (it is far-ranging but limited to one direction at a time), Clare's vision could be called kaleidoscopic (it is not concerned with distancing but with comprehensiveness, a circular all-at-onceness). Apart from juvenilia and occasional pieces for the Annuals, his vision is never framed and rarely static, he has no conventional point of view in either sense, his thoughts are hardly ever elevated, and he eschews perspective. He comes to maturity by discovering that all things, even the snails which he had timed with his watch, are in motion, and that objects are often best seen in close-up, thereby achieving a kind of fluid crystallization of images.

Clare had read enough as a literary man and suffered enough as a day-labourer to suspect that the idealization and the exploitation of a landscape often go together, and optical instruments are involved in both processes. Something of his vulnerability is revealed in the following passage from 'The Autobiography,' in which he testily dismisses the artificiality of 'an instrument from a shilling art of painting' (obviously a primitive camera obscura) in favour of the 'instantaneous sketches' of living nature. It is a dismissal as conscious, radical, and intelligent as Constable's rejection of the academic 'brown tree':

Sometimes he would be after drawing by perspective & he made an instrument from a shilling art of painting which he had fashiond that was to take landscapes almost by itself it was of a long square shape with a hole at one end to look through & a number of different colourd threads crossd into little squares at the other from each of these squares different portions of the landscape was to be taken one after the other & put down in a facsimile of the square done with a pencil on the paper but his attempts made but poor reflections of the objects & when they were finishd in his best colours they were but poor shadows of the original & the sun with its instantaneous sketches made better figures of the objects in their shadows

(Prose, p. 43)

No wonder Clare was nervous when his critics used topographical language. For him it was the language of disintegration, dislocation, disorientation. His publishers, Taylor and Hessey, who vigorously corrected his manuscripts against his will, wrote to him with advice such as: 'if you would raise your views generally & Speak of the Appearances of Nature each Month more philosophically'; and 'What you ought to do is to elevate your Views, and write with the Power that belongs to you under the Influence of true Poetic Excitement—never in a low or familiar Manner'; and 'let [your descriptions] come in incidentally—let them occupy their places in the picture, but they must be subordinate to higher objects.' It is a great honour to Clare as an artist that he ultimately refused to listen to this sort of advice; his refusal made him a poet, but it destroyed his material prospects. His finest book, The Shepherd's Calendar, which appeared in 1827 after years of tampering by John Taylor, fell on deaf ears, and an accurate edition did not appear until 1964.

The prospect formula is part of the neo-classical belief in the truth of the generalized, the idealized, the elevated. Dr Johnson, discussing the pastoral genre, writes:

though nature itself, philosophically considered, be inexhaustible, yet its general effects on the eye and on the ear are uniform, and incapable of much variety of description.

Clare's poetry is a direct challenge to that statement, as it is to Sir Joshua Reynolds' dictum, 'All smaller things, however perfect in their way, are to be sacrificed without mercy to the greater.' Clare's response is in the spirit of his age—botanists, following the pioneering work of Linnaeus, were at this time making a vast number of discoveries, which were then codified and illustrated. Clare himself was a skilful and knowledgeable botanist as well as ornithologist, and his library of about 440 volumes, still in existence at Northampton, contains many books on natural history. Inside the front cover of his copy of Isaac Emmerton's The Culture & Management of the Auricula, Polyanthus, Carnation, Pink, and the Ranunculus (1819), Clare has written a list of 22 Orchis's counted from Privet hedge.' Through his friend Henderson, the butler of his patron Earl Fitzwilliam at Milton House, Clare occasionally got glimpses of finer things. In the following extract from the 'Journal' of 15 December 1824, Clare's instincts run directly counter to Reynolds's generalization, as he carefully checks a personal discovery against the latest scientific codification:

Went to Milton saw a fine edition of Linnaeus's Botany with beautiful plates & find that my fern which I found in Harrisons close dyke by the wood lane is the thronpointed fern saw also a beautiful book on insects with the plants they feed on by Curtis

(Prose, p. 127).

The higher the viewpoint, the more generalized and idealized the view; the lower the viewpoint, the more particular details will crowd out or even obscure the general and ideal and assert their own disturbing independence. It is no accident that Dutch landscape painting, given low priority by Reynolds in his Discourses, was admired by English Romantic painters; Clare's favourite painter was De Wint, whereas the favourite landscape painter of the eighteenth century had been Claude Lorraine, whose tradition Clare detests. Nor is it accidental that the first indigenous school of English watercolours emerged in Norwich, in the midst of the great East Anglian plain, where the painter, having few conventional prospects, is forced into a direct contact with the atmospherics of the scene under a huge sky. Gainsborough in his early work such as 'Cornard Wood' and Constable in his most typical work were both inspired by the Suffolk landscape. The link between the Claudean bird's-eye view (used by Dyer and Thomson) and an increasingly lowered viewpoint which demands attention to detail is to be found in the development of the picturesque. At the beginning of the century poets learned to orientate themselves in landscapes by adapting the Claudean view to verse; by 1800 the cult of the visual had led to a complex awareness of stimuli, so that lichens or moss on old stonework could provide not only synaesthetic emotion ('the sight takes so many lessons from the touch' wrote Uvedale Price to Sir George Beaumont) but also could lead the observer into a magically microscopic world, where pictorial rules became irrelevant. Wordsworth writes of the Alps that they abound in 'images which disdain the pencil' and he transcends the picturesque by experiencing the sublime; Clare, as visually acute as Wordsworth, transcends the picturesque by discovering an equally awe-inspiring microcosmos.

The neo-classical theorist maintains that the poet does not number the streaks of the tulip, but Clare's eye-level is often no higher than a tulip, and he numbers meticulously:

With the odd number five strange natures laws
Plays many freaks nor once mistakes the cause
And in the cowslap peeps this very day
Five spots appear which time neer wears away
Nor once mistakes the counting—look within
Each peep and five nor more nor less is seen
And trailing bindweed with its pinky cup
Five lines of paler hue goes streaking up

And birds a many keep the rule alive
And lay five eggs nor more nor less than five
[Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield, eds, Selected Poems and Prose of John Clare, London, 1967, p. 111. Hereafter referred to in the text as SPP. This edition is cited as much as possible, as the editors do not tinker with the manuscripts or attempt to tidy up Clare's punctuation (or lack of it), which all other editors of Clare have done.]

Pope's well-known passage from An Essay on Man reads like an accusation of Clare's passionate botanising:

Why has not Man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly.
Say what the use, were finer optics giv'n,
T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav'n?

But Clare saw no reason why man should not have such a vision. His curiosity is scientific as much as poetic; indeed the modern separation of these two faculties would have been meaningless to him. He meticulously records what he calls 'snatches of sunshine and scraps of spring that I have gathered like an insect while wandering in the fields.' He would have understood Thoreau's journal entry for 27 July 1840: 'Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf and take an insect view of its plain.' Such a view is instinctive to a naturalist, but when the father of English naturalists, Gilbert White, turns to verse, his viewpoint remains conventional, elevated:

Romantic spot! from whence in prospect lies
Whate'er of landscape charms our feasting eyes …
Now climb the steep, drop now your eye below,
Where round the blooming village orchards grow;
There, like a picture, lies my lowly seat,
A rural, shelter'd, unobserv'd retreat.

The 'insect view,' as White the naturalist is aware, is closely allied to that scientific hunger for empirical data which was to have such momentous results in the nineteenth century. Gray's annotated copy of Linnaeus, Crabbe's botanical studies, Gilbert White's Journals and Garden Kalendar, Coleridge's Notebooks, Clare's Natural History Letters, are pioneering works in the closer study of nature which preceded Darwin. But as Swift knew when he wrote Gulliver's Travels, human beings look a lot less beautiful and important, although vastly more dangerous, when seen from an 'insect view.' The literary and social establishment ignored Clare's essential achievement for over a hundred years, and the annuals preferred to publish the conventional sonnets and ballads which he could churn out on demand.

The literary expression of the 'insect view' is much rarer than one might suppose. This is clarified when one thinks of Clare's lowly predecessors, who without exception were culturally assimilated, and who adopted linguistic and spiritual elevation in an attempt to raise themselves above their station. Perhaps the saddest example is Stephen Duck (1705-56), whose early poem 'The Thresher's Labour' contains many realistic descriptions of rustic labouring conditions. After he had been 'discovered' by Queen Caroline, presented with a benefice and the custodianship of her strange folly in Richmond Park, Merlin's Cave, Duck's talent dwindled to a coy mediocrity, as when he revisits the scenes of his past labours:

Straight Emulation glows in ev'ry Vein;
I long to try the curvous Blade again …
Behind 'em close, I rush the sweeping steel;
The vanquish'd Mowers soon confess my Skill.

Robert Dodsley, the Muse in Livery, wrote in 1731 'An Epistle from a Footman in London To the Celebrated Stephen Duck.' He prophesies smiling prospects for them both:

So you and I, just naked from the Shell,
In chirping Notes our Future singing tell;
Unfeather'd yet, in Judgment, Thought, or Skill,
Hop round the Basis of Parnassus' Hill.

The gods upon Parnassus eventually encouraged the fledgling to higher things, and Dodsley became a successful publisher. Other poets of lowly birth who wrote topo-graphicald verse in the conventional mould were James Woodhouse, Robert Tatersal, Ann Yearsley, Henry Jones, and Robert Bloomfield.

In his early years as a writer Clare talks of his own life and hopes, using the conventional and out-worn metaphors, a terminology derived from his wide reading in eighteenth-century poetry. (Among poets in the landscape tradition, Clare was deeply read in Milton, Gray, Collins, Thomson, Goldsmith, Cowper, and Wordsworth.) The acquisition of his mature style, which largely dispenses with trite metaphor, is a hard-earned process. In 'Help-stone,' written in 1809 when he was sixteen, Clare uses the analogy of birds which, like Robert Dodsley's, 'Hop round the Basis of Parnassus' Hill':

So little birds, in winter's frost and snow,
Doom'd, like to me, want's keener frost to know,
Searching for food and 'better life,' in vain
(Each hopeful track the yielding snows retain),
First on the ground each fairy dream pursue,
Though sought in vain; yet bent on higher view,
Still chirp, and hope, and wipe each glossy bill.
(Poems, I, 3)

Towards the end of another early poem, which describes a walk around Burghley Park (landscaped extensively by Capability Brown, 1754-83), Clare climbs Barnack Hill and gives a prospect, followed, as in Dyer and Bowles, by an association with time and hope:

Directly in the topographical tradition is 'Elegy on the Ruins of Pickworth, Rutlandshire. Hastily composed, and written with a Pencil on the Spot.' Clare must have been aware of how he was almost literally making a sketch, in the manner of hundreds of amateur tourists and artists, but his reading to this date (1818) had probably not included William Combe's Dr. Syntax series (1812) with its endless ridicule of such random sketching. The 'Elegy on the Ruins of Pickworth' is unusual in that Clare very rarely strays outside his own county; his mature verse is marked by its dogged rootedness, or later, a lament over forcible uprootedness. This poem seems all the more in the topographical mode by implying that the author is in transit, that this ruin is just another sought out for comparison by a picturesque tourist, another Dyer with his sketch-book, another Gray with his Claude glass, another Gilpin with his camera obscura, or another Bloomfield with his undiscriminating eye. The Pickworth Elegy rings false because Clare is consciously taking up a station, whereas his mature poetry is written by what Gilbert White called a 'stationary' man. In fact, Clare had the opportunity to describe the more varied Rutlandshire landscape intimately, for he obtained a job as a lime-burner for several months near the site of the deserted village of Pick-worth. But at this stage his style is heavily imbued with influences, notably of Goldsmith and Gray; indeed, his pen more than once returns an echo of the other more famous elegy:

A time was once, though now the nettle grows
In triumph o'er each heap that swells the ground,
When they, in buildings pil'd, a village rose,
With here a cot, and there a garden crown'd….

The ale-house here might stand, each hamlet's boast;
And here, where elder rich from ruin grows,
The tempting sign—but what was once is lost;
Who would be proud of what this world bestows? …

Since first these ruins fell, how chang'd the scene!
What busy, bustling mortals, now unknown,
Have come and gone, as tho' there naught had been,
Since first oblivion call'd the spot her own.
(Poems, I, 53-4)

Clare is never at home with this verse form; if the quatrain suits Gray's 'divine truisms,' it is quite inappropriate to the mature Clare's purpose, which is to catch the animation and detail of nature without imprisoning it in the frame of conventional form or manner, including punctuation. Clare is also uneasy with the visual demands of the perspective, with space used pictorially (the assumption of foreground, middle distance, and background), with time-projections (the retrospective use of a prospect), and with the moral vision controlled by the optical vision. Here he repeats in a laboured way the eighteenth-century device of pointing out landmarks within an ordered design, 'With here a cot, and there a garden crown'd … / The ale-house here might stand, each hamlet's boast; / And here … ' (my italics). This device presupposes that the landscape is seen as a framed picture, and is analogous to the device in painting by means of which a pointing figure draws attention to the focus of the eye.

III

'The Village Minstrel,' the title poem of the 1821 volume, uses 'prospect' in both of its principal senses:

Thus Lubin's early days did rugged roll,
And mixt in timely toil—but e'en as now,
Ambitious prospects fired his little soul,
And fancy soared and sung, 'bove poverty's control.
(Poems, I, 133)

So run the plough-boy's fanciful dreams. Something more imaginative begins to happen later in the poem. Clare has by no means found a voice of his own, but he is beginning to adapt the genre to the harsh facts and often joyous emotions of his life. As time goes on, he realizes that to talk of 'ambitious prospects' is not only trite poetically, but hopelessly unrealistic in terms of his own career. As a poet and as a man, he is more at home on a molehill than on a hill:

This verse can be taken as typical of Clare's early work: within it one can see the pull between convention and his own voice taking place. Although he is only on a molehill, he starts out 'to take a prospect'; his problem begins in the very next phrase, 'the circling scene.' His instinctive kaleidoscopic vision runs counter to the demands of the prospect; in order to take a prospect, the viewer must be static and he must look in one direction at a time (he may, of course, like the surveyor, make several sightings from the same spot, but in succession). Clare's enormous ambition seems to be to catch nature's events, pictures, and sequences simultaneously (one remembers the sun making its 'instantaneous sketches'). Furthermore, Clare does not just use the word 'circular'; he uses the active word 'circling.' Nature seems to be in constant motion, flitting past the poet's eye in such kinetic profusion that it threatens to break up the comfortable pictorial framework and the correspondingly strict verse-forms. Clare makes this clearer by repeating the word 'circling' in conjunction with the noun 'round' and hinting at frustration in the verb 'crowds': 'And every form that crowds the circling round.' It is all too much for the eye to take in, and rather than solve it in the easy way by succumbing to the convention (as W.L. Bowles was still doing as late as 1828), Clare senses that a new form of perception will have to be invented.

Clare is consciously committed to the low viewpoint, the 'insect view,' which is part of his problem:

His scientific and his poetic instincts ('Unnam'd, unnotic'd') commit him to 'creeping in the grass.' This position reduces the importance of the purely visual and increases the power of the other senses. The visual, nonetheless, may attain a sort of hallucinatory quality, especially in Clare's later poems, where the 'insect view' in the grasses resembles the disturbing vision of 'The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke' by Richard Dadd.

In "A Sunday with Shepherds and Herdboys" Clare begins to describe a prospect which would fit almost unnoticed into dozens of eighteenth-century poems, in the tradition of 'L'Allegro,' or Dyer's 'Grongar Hill,' or Thomas Warton's 'The First of April':

And oft they sit on rising ground
To view the landscap spreading round
Swimming from the following eye
In greens and stems of every dye
Oer wood and vale and fens smooth lap
Like a richly colourd map

But the multiplicity of things, that aspect of life which Louis MacNeice calls 'incorrigibly plural,' crowds in on all Clare's senses, and he becomes sensuously involved with his surroundings, rather than seeing nature at a distance:

Square platts of clover red and white
Scented wi summers warm delight
And sinkfoil of a fresher stain
And different greens of varied grain
Wheat spindles bursted into ear
And browning faintly—grasses sere
In swathy seed pods dryd by heat
Rustling when brushd by passing feet
(SPP, p. 94)

'Holywell,' a poem in the topographical tradition, contains another conventional prospect, but Clare then tacks about and rejects the prospect as 'fiction' in favour of the immediacy of 'nearest objects':

But as we turn to look again
On nearest objects, wood and plain,
(So truths than fiction lovelier seem),
One warms as wak'ning from a dream.
From covert hedge, on either side,
The blackbirds flutter'd terrified,
Mistaking me for pilfering boy
That doth too oft their nests destroy;
And 'prink, prink, prink,' they took to wing,
In snugger shades to build and sing …
I oped each gate with idle swing,
And stood to listen ploughmen sing;
While cracking whip and jingling gears
Recall'd the toils of boyish years,
When, like to them, I took my rounds
O'er elting moulds of fallow grounds—
With feet nigh shoeless, paddling through
The bitterest blasts that ever blew.
(Poems, I, 164-5)

Clare here brings present and past simultaneously alive with 'cracking whip and jingling gears.' Duck would rather not remember his 'shoeless' feet, and would have thought the following lines, so typical of Clare's later work, beneath his dignity:

And 'neath the hanging bushes creep
For violet-bud and primrose-peep,
And sigh with anxious, eager dream,
For water-blobs amid the stream;
And up the hill-side turn anon,
To pick the daisies one by one
(Poems, I, 166)

'The Woodman' contains another rejection of the conventional view:

The woodman turns from a prospect which is 'pleasing' in terms of fancy, but 'chill' in terms of his own life. There is a gruff, countryman's realism about the line, 'Though 'tis not his such beauties to admire,' and he seeks out the small but vivid comforts of his own experience. If the aristocrat tends to live in the past, and the bourgeois in the future, the countryman lives in the present. The pint of ale in his hand, or his 'snug cottage fire,' is of more interest to him than his ancestors or his prospects.

This uncalculating involvement with the present is well described bv W.K. Richmond in his discussion of the poem 'Pleasures of Spring': 'It is written as a labourer might hoe a field of turnips, with no eye on the ending, no thought of what is to come next, but with a massive, unquestioning patience which sustains the work and makes it not ignoble.' Clare's prose also has 'no eye on the ending, no thought of what is to come next.' In the following passage from 'The Autobiography,' in spite of the word 'survey' and Clare's position on a 'mossy eminence,' his eye does not pan the view as on a tripod; it zigzags from object to object like a gadfly, it has no resting-place or focal point around which to frame a design, and the writing catches the feeling of breathless excitement:

I dropt down on the thymy molehill or mossy eminence to survey the summer landscape as full of rapture as now I markd the varied colors in flat spreading fields checkerd with closes of different tinted grain like the colors in a map the copper tinted colors of clover in blossom the sun-tannd green of the ripening hay the lighter hues of wheat & barley intermixd with the sunny glare of the yellow carlock & the sunset imitation of the scarlet headaches with the blue cornbottles crowding their splendid colors in large sheets over the land & troubling the cornfields with destroying beauty the different greens of the woodland trees the dark oak the paler ash the mellow lime the white poplar peeping above the rest like leafy steeples the grey willow shining chilly in the sun as if the morning mist still lingered on its cool green

(Prose, p. 25)

That 'survey' would not be of much use to a cartographer. The absence of spacing, design, or perspective is paralleled by the absence of punctuation; one is not given a single comma to draw one's breath, or to feel that this is here, and that is there, or that this impression comes after the previous one. Instead, one is given a kaleidoscopic vision which shares the virtues of Clare's mature poetry—freshness, rhythmical subtlety, euphony, and the crystallization of emotion into haunting images.

IV

The same qualities can be found in the sonnets of Clare's maturity (from about 1821 onwards). If the sonnet is a 'moment's monument,' it is not difficult to understand Clare's success with this form, given his fascination with the ephemeral, the local, and the microscopic. In his use of this form Clare is often at the furthest remove from neo-classical tenets, unconcerned as he is with punctuation and perspective (in the topographical poem the two are connected), and the use of space and time as moral emblems. He extended the range of the sonnet, often in highly irregular ways—seven couplets strung together, for example. But Clare's mature sonnets are never stilted, and they impose upon him the pressure of selection from the endless detail at his disposal. They share Thomas Bewick's intense perception of the minutiae of nature and have Bewick's moral fervour without his moralizing—full of detail and texture, their wholeness is never distorted. They are tail-pieces (or tale-pieces) which catch the multiplicity of the world without imprisoning its bright details:

Now sallow catkins once all downy white
Turn like the sunshine into golden light
The rocking clown leans oer the spinny rail
In admiration at the sunny sight
The while the blackcap doth his ears assail
With a rich and such an early song
He stops his own and thinks the nightingale
Hath of her monthly reckoning counted wrong
'Sweet jug jug jug' comes loud upon his ear
Those sounds that unto may by right belong
Yet on the awthorn scarce a leaf appears
How can it be—spell struck the wandering boy
Listens again—again the sound he hears
And mocks it in his song for very joy
(SPP, p. 72)

There is no projection into past and future, no use of space in three dimensions, and no moralizing. Instead, it is the sound of the blackcap which spaces the poem in an arbitrary way, which the eighteenth-century eye might have found disorientating; to the 'rocking clown' it is freedom.

In order to experience the 'instantaneous sketches' of landscape rather than a static view in the single frame, Clare lowers his eye-level until he substitutes a molehill for Parnassus. The observation of the naturalist blends, as always in Clare, with the emotion of the poet:

Five eggs, pen-scribbled o'er with ink their shells,
Resembling writing-scrawls, which fancy reads
As nature's poesy, and pastoral spells—
They are the yellow-hammer's; and she dwells,
Most poet-like, where brooks and flowery weeds
As sweet as Castaly her fancy deems;
And that old mole-hill is Parnassus Hill,
On which her partner haply sits and dreams
O'er all his joys of song. Let's leave it still
A happy home of sunshine, flowers, and streams.
(Poems, II, 221)

The yellow-hammer is 'poet-like,' and 'her partner' is not only the male bird but Clare himself, versed in 'nature's poesy. ' This poem is an echo of the earlier, more complex 'Shadows of Taste,' in which the yellow-hammer is also praised as a poetic model worthy of imitation:

Taste with as many hues doth hearts engage
As leaves and flowers do upon natures page
Not mind alone the instinctive mood declares
But birds and flowers and insects are its heirs
Taste is their joyous heritage and they
All choose for joy in a peculiar way
Birds own it in the various spots they chuse
Some live content in low grass gemmed with dews
The yellow hammer like a tasteful guest
Neath picturesque green molehills makes a nest
Where oft the shepherd with unlearned ken
Finds strange eggs scribbled as with ink and pen
He looks with wonder on the learned marks
And calls them in his memory writing larks
(SPP, p. 112)

The molehills have not only become Parnassus, they are described as 'picturesque' as well. This adjective crops up frequently in Clare's poetry in the 1820s, but it is rarely used in a derivative way; it is used to create what an art historian has called a 'micro-panorama':

Rude architect rich instincts natural taste
Is thine by heritage—thy little mounds
Bedecking furze clad health & rushy waste
Betraced with sheeptracks shine like pleasure grounds
No rude inellegance thy work confounds
But scenes of picturesque & beautiful
Lye mid thy little hills of cushioned thyme
On which the cowboy when his hands are full
Of wild flowers learns upon his arm at rest
As though his seat were feathers—when I climb
Thy little fragrant mounds I feel thy guest
& hail neglect thy patron who contrives
Waste spots for thee on natures quiet breast
& taste loves best where thy still labour thrives

This sonnet, dated by Tibble in the period 1824-1832, is a deliberate inversion of the assumptions and devices of the prospect tradition. The wayward sheeptracks on the heath 'shine like pleasure grounds'; the poet mimics the tradition by pretending to 'climb' the hillocks, and he describes himself as the mole's 'guest,' an admission the topographical poet could not have made, dedicated as he was to creating the illusion that he was monarch of all he surveyed. Both mole and poet now create their own space, and are not passively contained, as objects, by an intellectually and aesthetically imposed order; they both 'choose for joy in a peculiar way.'

The ripening of Clare's vision evidenced by these quotations should be sufficient to refute John Middleton Murry's claim that Clare 'had nothing of the principle of inward growth which gives to Wordsworth's most careless work a place within the unity of a great scheme.' In spite of Eric Robinson's and Geoffrey Summerfield's refutation of this same passage (SPP, p xvii), the conscious artifice of Clare's best work is still undervalued. This is the price Clare paid for wanting to be too like nature—a very Romantic dilemma.

Just as Denham had assumed that, given the presence of a poet, Cooper's Hill could be made Parnassus, so Clare assumes that the meanest details of nature are poetic material. The molehills need no reference beyond themselves; they simply have to be loved, and the poet's 'natural taste,' in tune with 'nature's poesy,' will do the rest:

So where the Muses & their train resort,
Parnassus stands; if I can be to thee
A Poet, thou Parnassus art to me.

If Denham uses his eye like a telescope, Clare, having emancipated himself from the Denham tradition, turns out to be quite unlike those Romantics whose approach to nature might at first seem similar; he feels almost as uneasy with the constant need for elevation of sentiment in Wordsworth and Keats as he does with the ambiguities of the topographical tradition. Clare's reaction to Keats is that 'behind every rose bush he looks for a Venus & under every laurel a thrumming Appollo' (Prose, p. 223). The flowers at Clare's feet took all his love, and not those things that they symbolized; he happily ignored Lamb's advice to 'transplant Arcadia to Helpstone. ' He also chose to ignore Keats's comment, relayed to him in a letter of 1820 by John Taylor, 'that the Description too much prevailed over the Sentiment. ' Sentiment was over-employed by the Victorians until it became sentimentality. Clare's kinetic and microscopic descriptions, devoid of ethical, patriotic, or religious comment, link him rather to twentieth-century sensibilities than to nineteenth. Yet he is rooted in his landscape in a way no modern man can ever be again, which is why his vision is unique, and one for which lovers of poetry should become increasingly grateful.