SOURCE: "How to See Things with Words: Language Use and Descriptive Art in John Clare's 'Signs of Winter,'" in Language and Style, Vol. 20, No. 2, Spring, 1987, pp. 91-109.

That John Clare was a descriptive poet every reader of his poems would agree. That his descriptive skill was an unalloyed asset to his poetic art is a much more contentious issue. Thus, even the more enthusiastic appreciations of Clare's descriptive art are tempered with reservations, which echo Keats's observations as conveyed to Clare by John Taylor, that "the Description overlaid and stifled that which ought to be the Prevailing Idea."

John Middleton Murry, while endorsing Clare's "faculty of sheer vision" that he deems to be "unique in English poetry," remarks that "there is an intrinsic impossibility that vision of this kind … should ever pass beyond itself…. Clare's vision, we might say paradoxically, is too perfect." As John Barrell has reminded us, the assumption behind such statements—the idea that "for a descriptive poem to have content, it must pass beyond itself, into meditation or whatever," that is, that the "Prevailing Idea" must prevail and that the details of description must be subordinated to it—is something we should be wary of. Such assumptions have generated assessments of Clare as a failed Blake or Wordsworth. Until recently, few thought Clare's descriptive art was worth attention in its own right without such distorting external standards being applied to it. That Clare's singularity of vision presented him with artistic problems that needed radical solutions so that his individuality could find expression at all is a fact that has been recognized slowly. His debt to, as well as his distance from, the prevailing aesthetic and poetic conventions of his day are being more fully explored in order that his own artistic practice may be more fairly assessed.

One area that is still underinvestigated is Clare's linguistic art or the stylistic choices used that produce the effect of "purity of vision" in his poetry. This neglect is not surprising. Firstly, Clare's poetry has generally been regarded as a spontaneous overflow of an unmediated vision of nature. Middleton Murry is perhaps typical of this orientation:

Clare was indeed a singer born…. He was either a voice, one of the unending voices of Nature, or he was an eye, an unwearied eye watching the infinite processes of Nature; perhaps never a poet consciously striving by means of art to arouse in men's minds an emotion like his own.

What is missing from such pronouncements is the fact that the poems are crafted language—crafted to communicate the singularity of vision that was Clare's own and that such effects were a product of linguistic and rhetorical choices in Clare as much as they are in the work of any other poet. Secondly, whenever Clare's language has claimed critical attention, it has usually been to his detriment, since the focus has been on elements in his style that were seen as expressions of his social origins—dialect words, "substandard" grammar, lack of punctuation, and the like—which were regarded as offenses against prevailing canons of taste and barriers to artistic achievement. If we accept the modern case that Clare should be judged on his own terms in relation to what he was trying to achieve, then we also accept that his linguistic choices have artistic functions to perform that are worth investigation in their own right, a task that undue concentration on aspects of his biography alone cannot do. As Peter Levi has pointed out,

What was important in John Clare's genuineness was neither the extremity of his madness, nor the sweetness and harshness of his rural youth. They do mark him and limit him and define him. But in his artistry his workshop was the English language, and what is genuine in him could be seen and felt as language. That is the only medium in which we know him.

In attempting to analyze Clare's descriptive art from the linguistic point of view, this study will focus on one poem: "Signs of Winter." The aim is to explore the many strategies Clare used to activate a reader's visual sense, for it is in relation to this that the descriptive skill of the poet succeeds or fails.

     "Signs Of Winter"
Tis winter plain the images around
Protentious tell us of the closing year
Short grows the stupid day the moping fowl
Go roost at noon—upon the mossy barn
The thatcher hangs and lays the frequent yaum
Nudged close to stop the rain that drizzling falls
With scarce one interval of sunny sky
For weeks still leeking on that sulky gloom
Muggy and close a doubt twixt night and day
The sparrow rarely chirps the thresher pale
Twanks with sharp measured raps the weary frail
Thump and thump right tiresome to the ear
The hedger lonesome brustles at his toil
And shepherds trudge the fields without a song
The cat runs races with her tail—the dog
Leaps oer the orchard hedge and knarls the grass
The swine run round and grunt and play with straw
Snatching out hasty mouthfuls from the stack
Sudden upon the elm tree tops the crows
Unceremonious visit pays and croaks
Then swops away—from mossy barn the owl
Bobs hasty out—wheels round and scared as soon
As hastily retires—the ducks grow wild
And from the muddy pond fly up and wheel
A circle round the village and soon tired
Plunge in the pond again—the maids in haste
Snatch from the orchard hedge the mizled cloaths
And laughing hurry in to keep them dry.
[Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield (eds.), Clare: Selected Poems and Prose (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 163-64.]

"Signs of Winter" is a description of a rural village scene. It is written in declaratives, though the lack of stops, graphologically, in the punctuation means that it is a reader's syntactic knowledge that is used to reorganize a continuous passage of twenty-eight metrical lines into accessible syntactic units. The description is in the third person and in the present tense. The overall context of the poem's discourse is that of a viewer who tells us what is going on, of what is being "seen" as it happens. Participating in the discourse of the poem on the part of a reader involves, generally speaking, "sharing the view" of the scene presented—in other words, the creation, in imagination, of the perceptual context evoked by the poem's language. The persona presents salient details of the scene viewed, and it is open to readers to share the perspective presented, in the act of reading.

The success of such a sharing of perspective depends, we would expect, on the poet's skill in delineating the scene in the first place. But it is here that the first surprise of Clare's technique confronts us. Overall, the language used is remarkably plain and simple. Apart from a few dialect words and the occasional fronting of adverbials and the inversion of the Adj + Noun order, the style is bereft of the usual devices—syntactic deviation, unusual lexical collocations, virtuoso sound patternings, and so forth—that generally gladden an analyst's heart. The language is pared down to the bone, giving the impression of utter simplicity, plainness even, and if foregrounding is to be sought, it is to be found, without doubt, in the sheer ordinariness of the language used, which, in its uncompromising regularity, captures attention.

Out of such seemingly unpropitious materials, Clare has constructed a poem that achieves a vividness of effect that is the more surprising given the odds against it. The techniques used provide the means by which a reader's conceptual and perceptual operations are subtly and surprisingly controlled so as to foreground the act of viewing itself in such a way as to remove the glaze, the film of familiarity through which the habitual and the commonplace are usually perceived.

The poem opens with a simple assertion—"Tis winter plain"—which sets the scene as a wintry one, but the focus on the visual element is introduced in the next clause, when we are further informed that there are "images" around that are indicative of the season. Thus, from the very start there is the promise of a visual experience, the word images itself is foregrounded in taking two strong stresses in the opening iambic pentameter line.

Whatever our expectations of descriptions of wintry scenes and of images pertinent to them, Clare's images and the linguistic means of their construction overturn the more comfortable ones. The images chosen are commonplace and the linguistic means of expressing them show little if any originality. The noun phrases are, on the whole, simple—mostly Det + Adj + Noun with the occasional inversion of the Adj + Noun order, or Det + Noun, Adj + Noun, or Noun alone. There is some complex postmodification, as in lines 4, 5, and 6, but this is not usual. The choices of structure can be set out as shown in Table 1.

Det+Noun	Det+Adj+Noun	Adj+Noun	Noun
the images	the stupid day	sunny sky	noon
the rain	the moping fowl	(plain) winter	night
one interval	the mossy barn	sharp measured raps	day
a doubt	the frequent yaum	sulky gloom	shepherds

the sparrow	the sulky gloom	hasty mouthfuls	straw
the thatcher	the orchard hedge	mossy barn	visit
the ear	the elm tree tops
the hedger	the muddy pond
his toil	the mizled cloaths
a song	the weary flail
the shepherds	the (pale) thresher
the fields
the cat
the dog
the grass
the swine
the stack
the crows
the owl
the barn
the ducks
a circle
the village
the pond
the maids

There is a high preponderance of the definite noun phrase. Most of the head nouns in this list are concrete, though there is some use of abstract and mass nouns as well. In general, the nouns create a lexical field that signify familiar objects in a village scene. They could, in fact, be subdivided into those that have to do with village people and trades (thatcher, hedger, thresher, shepherd, maids), or animals and birds that inhabit the village (fowl, sparrow, cat, dog, swine, crows, ducks, owl), or familiar items of the landscape (barn, pond, hedge). The abstract nouns, on the whole, deal with the season and time of day (winter, day, noon, night), while some nouns deal with the weather (rain and sky). The objects denoted are extremely familiar ones, and the "images" that are focused on are those of the known, the familiar, and the everyday in this scene.

The use of adjectives, too, is remarkably simple, giving minimal attention to the quality of things described—thus, plain, moping, frequent, sulky, and so forth. Occasionally, nouns are used as adjectives—orchard hedge, elm tree tops, emphasizing their informational rather than their descriptive use. Clare does not use complex pre- or post- modification in the noun phrase to create intricate conceptual or perceptual configurations. Descriptive detail is kept to a minimum, and the descriptive resources of the language appear to be remarkably underused.

Neither noun nor adjectival usage furthers expectations of descriptive virtuosity. By contrast, verb usage shows variation, mainly stative or lacking in dynamism in the first part of the poem, and much more dynamic in the second part. Thus, up to about line 11 we find verbs like roost, hangs, lays, falls, leeking, trudge, which are either long drawn-out actions, or monotonously repetitive ones that inhibit a focus on mobility. After line 15, in the main, dynamic verbs are used: runs, leaps, knarls, play, snatching, swops, plunge, hurry. Thus, different qualities of the actions of the participants are focused on, rather than the actors or objects themselves. The lexis, overall, remains simple.

Such choices are indeed puzzling. As far as the images are concerned, the poem foregrounds concrete, commonplace objects, stereotypes even, with little attempt to make them complex or appealing. Given the expected descriptive goal of the poem, the absence of techniques to exploit the descriptive potential of the language is uncompromising enough to merit attention. On the other hand, the verb usage makes clear that these commonplace images are to be viewed in different aspects of movement. Thus, the fowl is seen about to roost, the thatcher in the actions of hanging and laying the yaum, the hedger hedging, the silent shepherd trudging the field, the cat running around, the dog leaping, the swine knarling grass, the crows and owl and ducks in various kinds of flight—each caught in some natural aspect of movement, making this commonplace scene uncommonly dynamic and mobile.

Even in this informal catalog of events and actions, the bounded and separated nature of the description is obvious. The images appear to have no relation to each other. The syntactic forms used, too, forbid any expansiveness of idea or perception. Although subordination is present, as in lines 5-9, its use seems to be localized. Coordination and parataxis appear to be the predominant forms used, giving the poem a loose, episodic structure. Each image is caught in some aspect of movement and the syntax encourages, in fact, directs, that its individuality and separate identity be respected, which the lack of overt cohesive ties reinforces. This is a crowded scene. Many participants are referred to but few are developed to any great extent. Each subject noun phrase that initiates a new main clause initiates a new topic as well, thus moving our attention to one more object or participant in the scene. Nor are spatial relations among objects themselves given, no hierarchies are established in terms of foreground or background, near or far. Each clause and each piece of information is given equal weight through the mainly paratactic structure—all are equally significant. The syntactic organization is such that we could easily conceive of further clauses being added to the end of the poem without any sense of dislocation. The form appears to be remarkably open-ended.

At first glance, therefore, we appear to be presented with a catalog of objects, a list. But what visual interest could there be in a list? The scene appears to be one of singulars, but how do we order this varied and singular world in order to visualize the objects together as an integrated whole? What we are given is a mode of expression, a style that has eschewed linkages that would give us interpretive directions on interrelating the details—and separate and singular details, do not, in the end, add up to an integrated notion of a whole.

Various ways have been suggested to interpret this aspect of Clare's work. In John Barrell's view, the linear order implicit in the parataxis of the syntax is, in fact, suspended in poems like these, and what is achieved is not linearity but a simultaneity of impressions—not this and this and this … but this while this while…. The images are revealed "as parts not so much of a continuum of successive impressions as one complex manifold of simultaneous impressions." This mode of simultaneous seeing is also used by Barrell to explain the lack of foreground and background in Clare's poetry. The viewpoint is close-up since the observer is not distanced from what is seen, all things are seen in the foreground. Barrell links such a mode of vision—especially the particularity and multiplicity of detail—to Clare's "sense of place," each place existing for Clare as "a manifold of things seen, heard, smelled." The manifold detail is seen as a product of knowledge, knowledge of Helpston, and signifies Clare's sense of Helpston. Thomas Brownlow too emphasizes the particularity of Clare's viewpoint, and awards the viewing persona with an "insect view" of the objects seen—the poems thus providing a "micro-panorama," not a prospect. Brownlow, however, counters the threat of a world of singulars in Clare's style by positing that the sharply delineated singulars "merge" into a whole of a "sharply dynamic picture": "It is as if the individual frames of each single sighted perception fade into each other so that nature is seen as a continuum." Thus, Clare's "experience of landscape becomes a continuous series of elements melting into each other."

Both Barrell and Brownlow are primarily engaged in the business of establishing Clare's mode of seeing as valid in its own right, especially when set against the powerful conventions of pictorial viewing promoted by Claude Lorrain and others, from which Clare's own mode of viewing was a radical departure. Clare's interest in the close viewpoint and in the particular was opposed to the principles of pictorial composition established by Claude, Poussin, and others. These principles required, among other things, that the viewpoint be from a height and that the eye be organized by the painting in such a way that it traveled through the painting to a final band of light just below the horizon. Objects in the landscape, too, were subordinated to the general design and awarded no singular interest. The general design predominated, each particular landscape organized, in turn, in terms of the "ideal" landscape, the whole being a triumph of design, of composition, which came to be privileged enough to persuade the ordinary, educated viewer that natural landscape itself was somehow organized in this way. Although these studies establish Clare's differences from the prevailing tradition, it is debatable whether the close-up view of sharply delineated singulars causes them to "fade" or "merge" into each other as suggested by Brownlow, since much in the language used, as we have seen, maintains singularity and respects the boundaries of objects in relation to each other. The notion of the simultaneity of seeing, as proposed by Barrell, is also questionable since it is not clear that we see things in this way, all objects in equally sharp focus, altogether, simultaneously. That the events described are probably happening simultaneously we would agree, but that the description denies order is more contentious. For there is an order, but the order is neither in the scene nor imposed upon it by some prior principles of design that the language reflects. It is rather the order of attention and interest of the viewing eye—of someone implicated in the scene—as it surveys the stuff of its surroundings. The perceptive eye focuses upon each object separately, giving each its due attention and establishes its own rhythm and movement as it gazes on this, glimpses that, or is distracted by something else. Each participant in the scene is focused upon for its own sake, mostly because it is there, as part of a given, habitual world. The interest of the images is the interest invested in them by the perceiver, in the familiar participants of a known scene going about their normal activities regardless of who is viewing them or whether they are being viewed at all.

There is, therefore, no motivation for "composition" in the painterly sense. The activities that occur are those that habitually occur though, perhaps, not in these particular ways each time, nor, we imagine, will the attention focus on identical aspects again. The poem captures an instance in the daily kaleidoscope of activities that occur in a lived locality. We are invited to see—to focus on objects with similar attention. It is this seeing, the activity of the gaze, that renders scenic the stuff of the everyday, thereby defamiliarizing the familiar. The moving gaze, in other words, creates the scene out of natural elements that exist outside the conventions of the "painterly" and makes them points of focus through attentiveness in the seeing. The world that emerges is not a mirror image passively recorded by the eye and represented in the language, but one shaped by selectivity and focus from that which has claimed the attention of the observer. The mode of perception presupposed by the poem is, therefore, not the gaze presupposed by a painting, trained and directed by convention and exposure, the preserve of the few, but the "active performance" of any eye turned to the world. That visual perception habitually involves such attentiveness, selectivity, intelligence, and, in its own way, creativity, has been made clear by Rudolf Arnheim:

As I open my eyes, I find myself surrounded by a given world…. It exists by itself without my having done anything noticeable to produce it. But is this awareness of the world all there is to perception? By no means. That given world is only the scene on which the most characteristic aspect of perception takes place. Through that world roams the glance, directed by attention, focussing the narrow range of sharpest vision now on this, now on that spot, following the flight of a distant seagull, scanning a tree to explore its shape. This eminently active performance is what is meant by visual perception. It may refer to a small part of the visual world or to the whole visual framework of space, in which all presently seen objects have their location. The world emerging from this perceptual exploration is not immediately given. Some of its aspects build up fast, some slowly, and all of them are subject to continued confirmation, reappraisal, change, completion, correction, deepening of understanding.

The pleasure of the poem is, in fact, the pleasure to be had by anyone who focuses on the familiar with heightened attention. It is the pleasure one may derive in contemplating the sounds and activities of the street one lives in, or looking again at the objects, lights, and shadows in a familiar or favorite room. Such things are not "composed" (in any sense of the term) for viewing, but seeing them with attentiveness makes them "scenic" for the duration and affords its own satisfaction.

The linguistic choices in the poem heighten the reader's seeing. "Sharing the view" of the persona is primarily to share the rhythm, direction, and intensity of the eye of the viewer as the objects and activities of the scene are focused upon. Most of all, it is the freshness of the familiar that is foregrounded by such perceptual acts. So how is it achieved?

In the first place, certain linguistic choices function as rhetorical strategies to draw the reader into a shared context of habituality and familiarity with the objects and actions described. Thus, the fiction of familiarity with the descriptive context of the poem is created. In particular, definite noun phrases mobilize a reader's sense of involvement in the familiar. The nouns, as we have seen, designate expected objects in a rural scene, but the definite article foregrounds knowledge of the scene described as already in common between, and shared by, the speaking persona and the reader. The reader is drawn into the fiction of a mutually known and shared context, and the surprise is not that such objects and participants are there, since we are supposed to know they are there already, but in seeing them in a particular way, with a particular focus and under certain aspects of their natural existence, patterned into art, which renders the natural, scenic.

The definite article in English has different functions to perform, and Clare brings many of them appropriately into play. It is an identifying and specifying agent; it signals that the item or subclass designated by the noun can be identified, though the direction of identification and referent retrieval can vary with the phoricity of the noun phrase in which the definite article functions as determiner; it directs a user to pick out a specific object in a context and reference. The use of the definite article also presupposes prior mention of the item so designated in the discourse. In communication, as Grice has pointed out, the definite article provides an implicature to the effect that the item referred to is known to both speaker and hearer. Thus, an utterance like "I saw the house yesterday" implies that the house in question is known to both speaker and hearer, while an utterance like "I saw a house yesterday" has no such implicature. In processing such utterances, according to Clark and Haviland, the definite article signals old or given information.

Clare's use of the definite article is a consistent feature of his language, and hence, of stylistic value. But his usage is also odd. There is virtually no prior mention of the nouns of the definite noun phrases in his poem, and almost all of them are given first-mentions only. But through its use Clare creates the fiction that the objects referred to are already known and identifiable, and within the mutual knowledge of both persona and reader as participants in the discourse. Selectivity, particularity, and specificity are thus signaled in the language in relation to the objects in this familiar scene.

Another noteworthy aspect of noun-phrase usage in this poem is the way in which such usage creates centers of focus for the viewer's eye. Most of the noun phrases are exophoric in reference. As Halliday and Hasan have pointed out, exophoric reference directs that the information necessary for identifying the referent is to be found in the situational context itself. As an example they give the following: "Don't go; the train's coming," where "the train" is interpreted as "the train we're both expecting." All immediate situational instances of the are exophoric in this way. Such types of reference also require satisfaction of the presupposition that the thing or object referred to be identified, and as such provide the cue, the instruction to the reader to satisfy the presupposition. Since this is fictional discourse, imaginative discourse, such acts of identification on the part of the reader involve the creation of the required referent—in imagination—so that the referential link with the context may be achieved. The "objects"—images—so created become the visual centers of focus in this familiar scene. The sheer regularity and variety of noun phrases of this kind means also that a whole visual field is created out of such centers of focus as they multiply through the poem. The rhythm established is the rhythm of focus of the seeing eye in relation to objects as it looks at a familiar scene and rests its attentive gaze, now on this, now on that, and heightens interest in the objects so selected by such focus. The creation of such centers of focus serves to frame for seeing the object and activity selected and make them targets of visual attention.

If this is the case, then what of visual interest is there in this selection of details that has been awarded such attention? The nouns signify objects that are exceedingly commonplace. Moreover, elaborate preor postmodification in the noun phrase has generally been omitted. Given the simplicity of the structure of the noun phrase, the head nouns become significant and remain the center of focus. This is especially the case in the subject noun phrases of the main clauses since each such noun introduces a new topic of interest. The head nouns so foregrounded refer to expected objects, but there is another dimension to them that functions for visual effect: the level of specificity in categorization specified by such nouns. Roger Brown has noted that, in a language, a referent can have many names—a dime can be a dime, a coin, money, a metal object, a 1952 dime, etc. In each such series consisting of a taxonomic hierarchy, there will be a neutral level of lexicalization, a neutral name, by which a referent is most commonly designated in a speech community and which children first learn. Brown calls this "the level of usual utility" in a community. Thus, a lexical item like dog would be at the level of usual utility rather than animal, quadruped, or spaniel, as would apple or orange rather than fruit, and table and chair rather than furniture. D. A. Cruse, developing Brown's arguments, regards such items as exhibiting what he calls "inherently neutral specificity." Contextual factors, however, can influence what passes for the neutral or "unmarked" term. Although dog would be the inherently neutral term, in a context that includes two dogs, where referents have to be successfully identified, the more specific term spaniel or Alsatian, what Cruse calls "contextually neutral terms," would be preferred in response to communicative pressures. Thus, "You take the spaniel for a walk and I'll take the Alsatian" rather than "You take the dog and I'll take the dog." Eleanor Rosch, too, working on the implications of such phenomena for human cognition, states that

categories within taxonomies of concrete objects are structured such that there is generally one level of abstraction at which the most basic category cut can be made. In general, the basic level of abstraction in a taxonomy is the level at which categories carry the most information, possess the highest cue validity, and are thus most differentiated from each other.

This basic level includes co-occurrence of clusters of attributes believed to be held in common by members of the class named, shared motor movements by humans in relation to them, and "averaged" shape. Pamela Downing, using insights from all three researchers and in relation to narratives elicited from Japanese and American viewers of the "Pear Tree" film, supports Rosch's thesis, since basic-level names outnumber super- and subordinate category names in the narratives analyzed—93 percent of normal mentions being basic-level category names.

The head nouns foregrounded in Clare's poem are, in fact, neutral specificity nouns, lexical items designating this basic level of categorization of objects. Occasionally, we have what could be regarded as context-specificity items, especially in the naming of different birds—fowl, owl, crows, ducks—since more than one kind of bird is mentioned, but these are still "level of usual utility" terms in relation to the classes named. In terms of visual effect, such a stylistic choice has two consequences. Given such neutral specification, emphasized by the absence of preor postmodification, readers are free to evoke from memory whichever kind of cat, dog, hedger, etc. they choose. No details of color, physical features, or any other individuating characteristics are given. But what is foregrounded by such usage are shapes—typical shapes of the objects mentioned, or in Rosch's words, "averaged" shapes, of a cat, dog, swine, thatcher, hedger, etc. In the fictional context of viewing a scene, such lexical items direct the focus on outlines of objects rather than on unique visual details about them. The skill of the graphic artist rather than the painter in oils appears to be at work here in the language, providing a purity of line in relation to the objects evoked that creates its own vivid, visual interest.

A tension is set up between the representational and the aesthetic demands of description. On the one hand, the existence of these objects in the visual context is achieved in the naming, which is one of the most obvious functions of the noun phrases used. In context, this function fulfills the expectation of a rural scene and gives the description specificity—these identifiable objects known to us, in this rural scene—but there are few surprises to be had at this level. On the other hand, the consistency with which a certain type of noun is used for the purpose of designation awards it stylistic value, and given the discoursal goal of visual interest in description, the visually interesting aspects of such usage are open to investigation. In the absence of any other cue in such a patterning of noun phrases, to divert the eye, the visual patterns in the objects designated become the centers of exploration for the viewing eye. The natural is thus rendered scenic since the eye is not allowed to pass over objects for information alone, but is made to focus on familiar objects in terms of their visual appeal. The cue is in the patterning, in the consistent choice of a feature—here, a kind of noun in a structurally simple noun phrase—that functions within the visual terms of the discourse, to order disparate natural objects together in relation to a common visual factor for the reader to confront.

This tension between the representational and the aesthetic demands of description is a consistent feature of the poem. In the verb phrases, too, some "true-to-life" aspect of action is delineated in relation to each object named: the hedger hedging, the thatcher about his business, the animals and birds in some familiar aspect of movement. Such actions, like the agents, are unrelated to each other. The lack of cohesive linkages to interrelate clauses ensures that each agent and its action is bounded within the clause in which it is portrayed. The object displayed in action becomes both an informational and a visual unit. In the representational dimension, the existence of such habitual actions reinforces again the sense of being involved in a typical rural scene, with everything going about its normal business. We get a sense, too, of the rich variety of the everyday in the constant flux of movement portrayed. But the patterning of such natural actions, in this normal scene, foregrounds movement and the movements portrayed, natural and unremarkable as they are from the representational point of view, create visual patterns of their own that form a high point of aesthetic interest for the observing eye.

The actions given are rather consistently ordered and pattern contrastively in the poem. This is evident in the types of verbs used: weakly dynamic or stative in the first part of the poem (roost, hangs, lays, nudged, drizzling, chirps, brustles, to stop, trudge), where movement, where it exists, is usually monotonous or repetitive, blunting thereby the impact of action. In the second part, by contrast, the verbs are dynamic (runs, leaps, grunt, play, snatching, pays, swops, flies, bobs, grow, wheel, plunge, snatch, laughing, hurry). Where the verb portrays less dynamism, the adverbs modify the verbs accordingly: thus grow wild, pays … sudden, while the word haste and its derivations like hasty and hastily are used often in this part of the poem. The transition from one pattern of movement to the other is sudden.

Action, of course, shows objects in motion, and motion, as Arnheim has reminded us, "is the strongest visual appeal to attention." Action ensures that objects change their relative position in space, and the space traversed by movement is dramatized and highlighted for the eye. Moreover, objects can be related to each other by motion, and this reveals them as belonging to an integrated, individual portion of space. Thus, although spatial relations among objects are not given—there are no interclausal depictions of spatial relations—within each clause, individual objects are linked together into integrated spatial units by the actions described, and thus larger visual units are forged. Spatial units of different sizes are thus bracketed off for attention by the movements that bring them into relation. Thus, the thatcher hanging and laying the yaum brings the height of the barn and the thatcher at work on its roof into relation to form an integrated spatial unit. Similarly, the hedger at work on the hedge forms another unit, as do the shepherds who are located within the expanse of the field. In such units, in this part of the poem, textures are also evoked in the larger and darker masses of barn and hedge, while varying heights can be inferred from such units—the thatcher and the fowl placed higher up than the hedger and the shepherds. Smaller blocks of integrated space are evident in the second half of the poem: the cat chasing its own tail integrates a much smaller amount of space; the dog leaping over the hedge brings the dog in the air, the top of the hedge, and the ground into relation. Similarly, the swine in the vicinity of the haystack close enough to snatch out hasty mouthfuls becomes a unit. Height is evoked once again in the crows perching on the elm tree tops, since it is the top of the trees and the crows that are most immediately brought into relation, and although the plural forms are used for both crows and tree tops, it is the action of crows dispersed on branches rather than a massed unit that is evoked. The maids too, in relation to their houses, are scattered rather than massed, as are the ducks in relation of the whole expanse of the village as they fly over it. These create more open spaces. Such integrated spatial units not only provide varied organizations of space in the scene, they also provide different planes of activity, different heights and distances, different textures, but all of them within the visual field of the observer—all, that is, that can naturally be seen in the landscape.

The emphasis on movement produces another effect that is worth noting. Each action mentioned traces its own movements, which animates in highly visual ways the space in which it is performed, since shapes are traced by such movements in space. Shapes thus created provide a high point of interest for the eye. The verbs in the first part of the poem trace repeated movements that either do not occur across space, or occur only very gradually. The repetition of the same movement in this way creates abstract shapes—verticals and horizontals mostly in the first part of the poem. The hanging of the yaum, the incessant drizzle of the rain, the "leeking" of the rain, the up and down sameness of trudging, all of these trace vertical shapes, while the laying and nudging of the yaum, the hedger's toil at his hedge, and even the slow progress of the shepherds create horizontal, linear shapes in the main. The moping fowl remains in a class of its own, the shape given by the noun in focus, the verb holding it in its stillness.

In the second part, the repetition of horizontals and verticals gives way to a whole choreography of dynamic shapes. Thus, circles: the cat running races with its tail, the swine running round, the owl that wheels round. A parabola is traced in the movement of the dog leaping over the hedge; a circle, or an ellipse, in the movement of the ducks wheeling over the village; zig-zag shapes in the various snatching movements—the swine snatching out hasty mouthfuls from the stack and the maids snatch their cloaths from the orchard hedge; angles—in the plunge of the ducks into the pond, and their rising, and in the owl that bobs out of the barn and bobs back in again. Even a few squiggles are available in the untidy visit of the crows on the treetops, and a horizontal in the linear movement of the maids going indoors.

The patterning of movement in this way provides visual appeal in its own right, but there is another aspect that functions for aesthetic effect. The verbs, as we saw, are patterned in terms of contrast: strongly dynamic in the second part of the poem, weakly so or stative in the first part. In the absence on the whole, of lexis-signifying color in the poem, movement, especially the patterning of contrasting types of movement, is used to "color" the scene. The effect so achieved evokes moods and atmosphere in relation, cumulatively, to a whole cluster of details rather than to distinguish any individual item in terms of its physical appearance. Thus, the first part of the poem is generally leaden and heavy in mood, while the second is light and lively, and the patterning of the verbs into + or - DYNAMIC in the two parts of the poem plays a crucial part in the creation of such an effect.

A heavy film of gray shrouds the first part of the poem, achieved, in particular, by the negative aspect of the verbs. The continuous tense in the description of the rain as drizzling and leeking, extends these actions of the rain past hope of ceasing, casting a shadow of wetness and gloom over the whole scene. Similarly, the repetitive actions of hanging and laying the yaum, and of trudging, signify monotony and heaviness, the same thing done over and over again, and slowly, laboriously. The threshing, too, foregrounds monotony. The fowl that roosts is both still and about to sleep, and that at noon, in which the adverbial reinforces the negative aspects of actions in the verb. Similarly, the positive hint in grows is negated by short, as is the possibility of dynamism in brustles, since the hedger brustles only at his toil, all of which modify, negatively, the actions signified by the verbs.

These heavy, monotonous, dreary actions are reinforced by the device of using an "insider" perspective, in which the emotional coloring given to events is negative as well. The description of the fowl as moping is as it strikes someone who has evaluated its stance. The subordinate clauses, in particular, display such an internally evaluated perspective. Lines 6, 7, and 8 tell us more about the drizzling rain but they are all evaluated observations. "For weeks still leeking on that sulky gloom": the time element has been stretched to "weeks," and hints at a persona who has been present in the scene for a long time, and who is also fed up with the incessant rain. Similarly, sulky shows the objective grayness given a subjective rendering, and in the description of the gloom as a doubt 'twixt night and day, the doubt is in the persona, not the grayness. The hedger is seen as lonesome—again as he appears to an observer, a subjective not an objective detail, while observations like the shepherds trudge the fields without a song and the sparrow rarely chirps place the observer very firmly in the scene, as an insider, someone who is familiar with what to expect and misses the sounds when they are not there. Sounds are also used effectively in the onomatopoeia of thump after thump and in twanks, since the description is from the point of view of an insider who has heard the sounds to the point of boredom. This perspective on events, similarly, focuses on the negative, the lonely, the monotonous, the dreary aspects of the scene, creating a heaviness and leadenness of mood as a result.

The long vowels used in this part of the poem reinforce this mood of leadenness. Thus, we get lexis with long vowels like roost, noon, barn, frequent, yaum, falls, weeks·, leeking, gloom, or lexis whose vowels are lengthened by the meter: hangs, lays, etc.—that slow down the rhythm and reinforce the general monotony of the actions.

There are long vowels in the second part, but they do not work in tandem with other devices to point in the same interpretive direction, which, in the first part, is mostly negative. Such a mood is radically altered, without warning, in the second part of the poem. The tempo speeds up; dynamic movement, sprightliness, and light enter the scene. The observer has withdrawn from evaluating what occurs, and the dynamism is allowed to speak for itself.

There is little representational motivation for such a contrast of patterning. In fact, in terms of representation and the "realism" expected, this aspect of the poem creates a problem. How do we integrate these two self-contained moods into the same scene? Aesthetically, however, humor is created in this unexpected turn of events. The patterning also enables us to see two otherwise antithetical aspects of the same scene as two differing aspects of life from the persona's perspective. Work is integral to the life of this scene, and by implication, to this community, but the work itself can be laborious, monotonous, and dreary. The humans, apart from the maids, are all seen as restricted and confined both in movement and space by work, and are defined by work. On the other hand, the natural life of the scene is portrayed as free in its natural existence, the rhythms of natural movement, dynamic. Life, therefore, can be hard and gray, but also light and lovely. The patterning foregrounds the distinctiveness of each aspect, but with a gentle humor evident in the co-occurrence. Nor are we allowed to make easy or exclusive conflations of leadenness and humans and lightness and nature. The bedraggled fowl and silent sparrow in the first part and the laughing maids in the second provide cross-connections between the patternings that undercut such exclusions, and integrate these aspects as within the personal experience of the persona.

Such an undercutting has other consequences worth noting. It problematizes the time factor involved in viewing this scene. The persona is located not only as "insider" but as cohabitant in this scene, not a picture-viewer viewing a representation in a gallery, nor a Claudian landscape-viewer, with picture glass in hand. The time presupposed by the poem is, therefore, the time at the disposal of a cohabitant, someone who has been in the scene and remains within it over a period of time, who has watched the changing aspects of life around him in all weathers, and is responsive to its many facets. The truth to life in this dimension is a truth arising from the stuff of lived experience, through being resident in a place, of being located within it, across real time. It is not the realism derived from the conventions of representational art that we are dealing with here, and its inclusion in the poem, paradoxically, disrupts conventionalized realism. But it is the perspective of such a persona that we share as readers of the poem, whose art of seeing and responding to his familiar world the poem makes available.

And finally, the syntactic structure of the poem, through coordination and subordination, establishes a rhythm as the eye of the observer roams over this scene, linking this world of singulars together, linearly, as the eye encounters and explores the visual events of its world. Thus, the activity of the eye is varied. Coordination generally moves the eye on to different details of the action attended to, while subordination enables the eye to pause, the gaze arrested by some aspect which, in turn, causes some effect on the persona, and a personal, evaluated response is given. Within the main clauses, therefore, spans of attention awarded are ordered differently. A rhythm is established that provides a variety that parallels the different kinds of movement traced.

The activity of the thatcher spans two lines, although the clause itself is constructed of more lines than this. The eye takes in the details of the activity, but as it watches the close laying of the yaum, the persona comments on the unending dreariness of the rain, which the thatcher's work must keep out. While all this is being indulged in, the thatcher and his activity in the incessant rain remains in focus. It is a long pause in relation to the fowl, for instance, or even the hedger or the shepherd. Similarly, the activity of the thresher captures the persona's attention, but here, the time span of the eye is reinforced by the sounds of the activity striking the ear, as the twanking of the frail goes on rhythmically, thump after right tiresome thump, until the ear is wearied and the eye moves on. In the second part of the poem, we get further instances of complex constructions, but here complexity arises mainly from coordination. The coordinate constructions are generally coordinate verbs. Thus, while the subject remains stable, different actions of the same agent are traced, and this attention to different actions that make up the overall activity is a consistent feature of this part of the poem. The continuity of the agent in the discourse in relation to the actions unifies them, but since they are different actions, the eye remains mobile and particular in its attention to this kind of detail. Smaller rhythms are thus set up in relation to the attention awarded to the overall activity. Thus, the activity of the dog leaping over the hedge and knarling the grass is broken into two time spans for the eye—leaping quicker than the repetition of knarling. The swine run round, grunt, and play with straw / Snatching out hasty mouthfuls from the stack similarly creates its own subrhythms of seeing. The stacking of verbs in this way continues: the crows pay an unceremonious visit, croak, then swop away; the owl bobs hasty out, wheels round, scared, hastily retires; the ducks grow wild, fly up, wheel . . plunge…. The simple sentences: Short grows the stupid day, The moping fowl go roost at noon, the cat runs races with her tail and the like, shorten the time span of attention. In the coordinated units, time is varied—swops, involving less attention than the long sweeping movement of the ducks flying round the village. Subordination, especially in the first part of the poem, appears to provide the longest pauses of all, a long gaze as opposed to the quicker pacing of the eye in the second part. But the eye moves naturally, in relation to the scene. It can glance at something, gaze at something else, or even glimpse a fleeting movement like the laughing of the hurrying maids, contemplate something until it moves into its own thoughts, or is distracted in whatever direction by the sudden movement of some other activity, it can take in a whole wealth of detail as it happens, its rhythms conditioned only by its own responsiveness to whatever is happening around it. This is not the gaze presupposed by eighteenth-century painting—rather the "performance" of active seeing. But the performance, in its rhythms and in its highlighting of its own acts of seeing, foregrounds itself into art.

The performance is not allowed to dull or to go stale on us. The paratactic structure bounds each clause or even a smaller syntactic unit in terms of separateness, but this has its own visual reward. Changes of topic in each of the clauses provide new foci of interest. One is, therefore, not allowed to gaze too long at anything in case the eye is dulled. Arnheim has pointed out that vision is geared more to cope with change than immobility or monotony, and that even primitive animals stop reacting to a given stimulus if it reaches them over and over again. As far as humans are concerned, the eye and brain can be similarly dulled by too much looking on the same thing:

When a person is forced to stare at a given figure he will use any opportunity to change it by varying it: he may re-organize the grouping of its parts or make a reversible figure switch from one view to the other. A colour looked at steadily tends to bleach, and if the eye is made to fixate a pattern without the small scanning movements that are never absent otherwise, that pattern will disappear from sight after a short while. [Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking]

The changes of topic in the poem ensure that the focus on each of these, in turn, is sharp. Even in the first part of the poem, where repetition of movement and monotony of the work and the weather are portrayed, "scanning movements" are introduced in the repetitions of movement, and the switch is made into the observer's feelings about the scene, thus averting the danger of dulling the eye. Instead, the interest remains on all the other aspects of this part of the scene: its heavier mood, its slower rhythms, the shapes traced by movement and object, the vignettes of daily life portrayed, and the reality of the wintry aspects of the life around. In the second part, of course, changes of topic and movement are carried to a height, so that the exploitation of this aspect of vision achieves a kind of apotheosis. The open-ended nature of the ending holds out the promise of more visual wealth, but wisely refrains from satiating the eye.