SOURCE: “Writing Misreadings: Clare and the Real World,” in The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-Taught Tradition, edited by John Goodridge, The John Clare Society and The Margaret Grainger Memorial Trust, 1994, pp. 125-38.

[In the following essay, Chirico argues that Clare's poetry is “informed by a complex and continuing theme: that of the troubled and unresolved relationship between precise, yet diverse and constantly changing, natural observations and their fixed and limited representation in poetry and memory.”]

I

In a thoughtful and perhaps long overdue article, ‘The Complexity of John Clare’—recently published in John Clare: A Bicentenary Celebration—Kelsey Thornton, while still (rightly) referring to John Barrell's The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place as ‘the best piece of writing about Clare’, takes issue with some major points in Barrell's argument, principally his reluctance to acknowledge Clare's use of symbolism. My own position certainly owes a lot to Barrell, and I think therefore that I am approaching my subject from a different starting point—but Kelsey Thornton does deal with the two main strands of my argument: firstly, that ‘for Clare a landscape is not fully realised until it finds expression in or some association with poetry’. Secondly, that ‘Clare's consistency is built on a thoroughgoing notion of the place of a different truth from the reality of tangible existence in front of him.’ My conclusion is that, while this distinction between local truth and eternal truth is essential to much of Clare's poetry, he consistently identifies the eternal or general or imaginative reading with a loss of integrity.

My paper is a condensed version of a dissertation on Clare's uses and abuses of perception and representation; I hope that in cutting out some of the footwork I have left a coherent tour. The quotation which I placed as an ironic epigraph to that dissertation—Clare's disingenuous self-identification with a conventionally naive literary model ‘I found the poems in the fields / And only wrote them down’—doesn’t fool us for long, despite a century or more of acquiescence from the literary establishment. I will avoid a long discussion of the opposing views and instead propose that while his prose writings confirm his intimate knowledge of nature and his belief that literary affectations undermine the power of poetry to transmit the vibrancy of life, they equally reveal his critical interest in the structure of landscape painting and in its linguistic parallels of grammar, syntax and punctuation. These structural concerns reflect the realisation that no artistic work can involve a single, defined relationship between artist and subject matter—Clare and Nature, for instance—but rather a scries of relations of perception and description or depiction of objects whose positioning in the work (through techniques such as perspective and syntax) places them in a further complex of inter-relations.

I will argue that his poetry of all periods is informed by a complex and continuing theme: that of the troubled and unresolved relationship between precise, yet diverse and constantly changing, natural observations and their fixed and limited representation in poetry and memory. This conflict will be seen to focus most sharply in Clare's repeated attempts to describe a landscape which is, for various reasons, deprived of its familiar features.

II

These questions of transience, perception and representation seem particularly relevant to a passage from ‘March’ of The Shepherds Calendar:

The shepherd boy that hastens now and then
From hail and snow beneath his sheltering den
Of flags or file leavd sedges tyd in sheaves
Or stubble shocks oft as his eye percieves
Sun threads struck out wi momentery smiles
Wi fancy thoughts his lonliness beguiles
Thinking the struggling winter hourly bye
As down the edges of the distant sky
The hailstorm sweeps—and while he stops to strip
The stooping hedgbriar of its lingring hip
He hears the wild geese gabble oer his head
And pleasd wi fancys in his musings bred
He marks the figurd forms in which they flye
And pausing follows wi a wandering eye
Likening their curious march in curves or rows
To every letter which his memory knows
While far above the solitary crane
Swings lonly to unfrozen dykes again
Cranking a jarring mellancholy cry
Thro the wild journey of the cheerless sky

(The Shepherd's Calendar [John Clare, The Shepherd's Calendar, ed. Erie Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964; rev. edn., ed. Robinson, Summerfield, and David Powell, 1993)], 1964, pp. 32-3)

To those who argue that Clare's reliance on particular acts of perception has been exaggerated we can immediately concede at least that many of the nature poems from his middle period (and especially his bird poems) are informed by knowledge from outside the experience of the characters or situation in the poem itself—the result of the poet's own encyclopedic interest in natural history. But in the extract we have just read, this distinction between the poet's knowledge and the poetic subject's perception is extended into an unequivocal distancing of the poet from the shepherd. As narrator of a series of monthly poems in which individual locals appear only fleetingly, Clare is secure in his controlling knowledge; this shepherd boy's ‘fancy thoughts’ of the end of winter at the very sight of a sunbeam, for instance, simply recall similar false expectations in ‘February’. Nonetheless Clare is at pains to present sufficient visual information—the hailstorm on the horizon—to alert the shepherd to his mistake, if he would only exercise his powers of perception in a comprehensive way. This he fails to do, instead privileging one sight over another; thus, similarly, as his ‘wandering eye’ follows the flight of the geese the implication is surely that the crane's progress across the sky goes unseen. Through the mediation of the shepherd, then, Clare paradoxically disqualifies Arthur Symons' assessment that ‘His danger is to be too deliberate, unconscious that there can be choice in descriptive poetry’—paradoxically, because the crane finds its way into the poem, if not into the awareness of the shepherd.

The first half of the extract conveys a series of experiences, some habitual and in the shepherd's past (sheltering, seeing the sunbeam), some in the present of the poet's perception (the den, the approaching hailstorm) or the shepherd's action (stripping the ‘hedgbriar’) or his imagination (the end of winter). In the second half this temporal complexity unwinds somewhat as the shepherd's single-minded attention to the geese necessitates a pause, which implicitly undermines the possibility even of a continuum of perception. It seems that in order to come to terms with what he sees—the geese—he must relate it to what he already knows—the letters of the alphabet—at the same time highlighting one perception by isolating it from all the others which compete for his attention. He is responding to a dilemma which John Ashbery recognises in his prose poem ‘For John Clare’:

There is so much to be seen everywhere that it’s like not
getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new,
never any different.(1)

Unless it can be categorised or placed into a recognisable cognitive relationship with some remembered natural (or linguistic) phenomenon, a newly perceived object is destined to float free in the mind of the perceiver, carrying no meaning and making no difference. In this poem Clare is able to enjoy both sides of the paradox by using the shepherd as his foil. While ostensibly undermining his character's fanciful schemes of figuration he introduces the ‘solitary crane’ which, like the sand martin in the poem of the same name (Midsummer Cushion [John Clare, The Midsummer Cushion, ed. Kelsey Thornton and Anne Tibble (Ashington/Manchester: MidNAG/Carcanet, 1979, 1990)], p. 460), unmistakably figures the alienated and melancholy poet.

III

Let us turn now to a quite different poem, a ‘Fragment’ from Knight's second volume of asylum transcripts:

The cataract whirling to the precipiece
Elbows down rocks and shoulders thundering through
Roars, howls and stifled murmers never cease
Hell and its agonies seem hid below […]
Horrible mysteries in the gulf stares through
Darkness and foam are indistinctly seen
Roars of a million tongues and none knows what they mean

(Later Poems, II, 766)

The syntactical practice could hardly be further removed from that in ‘March’; here every line except the first is effectively endstopped. This imposing sense of an invisible punctuation recalls Edward Strickland's observation of the ‘punctuational frenzy’ which came to accompany every emission of the word ‘sublime!’ from the pen of Clare's mentor and patroness, Mrs Emmerson.² The implication, then, is of a regularised setpiece, consisting of separate observations and conjectures which nevertheless all contribute to the conceptual unification of darkness, high wind and hell.

The apprehension of the union underlying this eschatological translation is abstract in the sense that meaning can nowhere be fixed by perception. Vision is characterised by a near-apocalyptic uncertainty—even darkness itself is ‘indistinctly seen’—and the unsemantic ‘roars’ and ‘howls’ crowd out the ‘stifled murmurs’, which at least hint at comprehensible communication. Such total absence of rational and communicable meaning is radically internalised in an untitled stanza written early in 1845:

There is a chasm in the heart of man
That nothing fathoms like a gulph at sea
A depth of darkness lines may never span
A shade unsunned in dark eternity
Thoughts without shadows—that eye can see
Or thought imagine tis unknown to fame
Like day at midnight such its youth to me
At ten years old it boyhoods secret came
Now manhoods forty past tis just the same

(Later Poems [The Later Poems of John Clare, 1837-1864, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (two volumes, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)], I, 165)

Here the ‘heart of man’ is figured in the terms of sublime nature—a ‘gulph’ or ‘chasm’. Notably these emblems are based on absences—like the absence of the sun and of light in line four—creating a gap which, we are told, can be neither bridged nor adequately represented by poetry. Thus we are faced yet again with the paradox of a poem about the impossibility of linguistic or literary representation. This poem itself becomes obscure towards the end, and while this is not helped by Clare's virtually undecipherable pencil scrawl (‘secret’ in the penultimate line is an uncertain reading), the semantic uncertainty surely reflects the poet's professed inability to ‘imagine’ his own thoughts. This mental alienation is described in the visual terms of light and darkness. The ‘depth of darkness’ at the heart of the mature poet provides no light for a translation of his thoughts into shadows; without such illumination those thoughts evade perception.

The extent of the alienation which can be caused by disturbed perceptions and a failure of communication is described in ‘Perplexities’ (Later Poems, II, 974-5) where the poet, although quite happy to talk to the birds, flowers, wind and rain, finds himself unable to speak when he meets his ‘dear one’:

I scarcely presume to cast on her my eye
And then for a week I do nothing but sigh

This response of excessive communicative isolation brings to mind the self-contained chamber of the medieval lover or the drawing room of the sentimental hero rather than the often claustrophobic reality of life in a poor cottage in a rural village. The idea is entirely uncharacteristic of Clare and the relative lightness of the verse does not prevent a genuine sense of perplexity; the resonances of ‘I feel myself lost’ in the final line transcend the tone we generally find even in his ballads of loss or betrayal. This sense of disturbed sadness can be traced to a realisation that the ‘dear one’ is less visually appreciable than her emblem:

If I look on a wild flower I see her face there
There it is in its beauty all radient and fair

In the actual presence of the beloved it is not only speech and vision that are disrupted, but also sound: ‘the noise o’ my footsteps may scarcely be heard’.

It is becoming clear that for Clare the concept of ‘universal meaning’ is largely anomalous. A great number of his poems are explicitly concerned with the way that knowledge is established through an endless series of acute observations which can themselves only gain meaning when related to the perceiver's pool of knowledge, or memory. The communication of this meaning, of which poetry is one form, requires a verbal figuration which can only be a comparison and modification of past linguistic experience. When that past experience has become alienated to the extent that the present memory of the past is ‘Like day at midnight’, as in ‘There is a chasm … ’, there can be no communication and no meaning. The description of this breakdown as a failure of vision (‘Thoughts without shadows—that eye can see’) demonstrates the way in which all these issues of memory, meaning and representation depend for Clare on the accuracy of perception. Even the attempt to image Hell through a sublime description of nature's power in the ‘Fragment’ discussed above can be seen in this light: heightened perceptions which defy and exceed the comparisons offered by memory, modulating to a failure of communication which is essentially an exponentially intensified version of that related in ‘Perplexities’.

The idea that acts of perception form a constant theme throughout Clare's work hardly sounds radical and yet the majority of his critics have favoured exclusively either his ‘early’ poems of specifically local description, or an extremely small selection of ‘visionary’ lyrics written in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. Both are clearly concerned with the success or failure, the precision or abstraction of perception. It will be illuminating to examine instances where the precision of his perception is radically undermined by a defamiliarised landscape.

IV

Winter is come in earnest & the snow
In dazzling splendour—crumping underfoot
Spreads a white world all calm & where we go
By hedge or wood trees shine from top to root
In feathered foliage flashing light & shade
Of strangest contrast—fancys pliant eye
Delighted sees a vast romance displayed
& fairy halls descended from the sky

(‘Snow Storm’, Midsummer Cushion, p. 487)

The declared ‘calm’ of this scene is challenged by a visual intensity, attached not only to the ‘dazzling’ snow but to the trees which ‘shine’ from their new covering. The contrasting tones which they project imply intense shadows, which here suggest a transformation of sorts—the trees have, after all, been endowed with the slightly destabilising ‘feathered foliage’. It is this initial peculiarity of vision which inspires an abstracted reverie, strongly recalling the indulgence of the shepherd boy in ‘March’. Once again ‘fancys pliant eye’ is distracted from its usual mode of perception (which is ordered primarily in spatial terms—‘where we go / By hedge or wood’) to wander freely, gazing upwards. The observer proceeds to recognise in nature the pattern of a familiar image—this time from his reading of romance rather than from the alphabet. This recognition brings a change from precise observation of, for example, ‘the smallest twig’ to a focus on ‘its snowy burthen’ and thence to a uniting of all those individual burdens into an imaginative transformation of the whole scene. The suggestion that this ‘vast romance’ is ‘displayed’ rather than imaginatively created is a significant reversion to the conventional eighteenth century language of a nature which readily ‘yields’ scenes and interpretations to the detached onlooker. In other words, we are pointed towards the possibility of a ‘moralized’ landscape conveying a ‘universal meaning’. I will argue that this particular imaginative-visual construction is clearly signalled as a misreading of nature; it extends, nevertheless, to the perception of ‘arch & pillar’, then of a hermitage and its occupant:

One shapes his books his quiet & his joys
& in romances world forgetting mood
The scene so strange so fancys mind employs
It seems heart aching for his solitude
Domestic spots near home & trod so oft
Seen daily—known for years—by the strange wand
Of winters humour changed—the little croft
Left green at night when morns loth look obtrudes
Trees bushes grass to one wild garb subdued
Are gone & left us in another land

The world is forgotten, both in terms of consciousness (the fantastic reverie) and of locality (the snow leaving us ‘in another land’). Both these forms of subversion rely on an alteration to the normal modes of perception resulting, we are told, from the magic power of winter. While the fanciful conjecturing of fairy halls and so on seems to spring from an unnaturally intense (‘dazzling’) visual singularity caused by exaggerated tonal contrasts in specific natural objects, the later defamiliarisation of identity-fixing terrain results from a quite opposite process: an imposed uniformity which expressly undermines the individuality of any natural feature. These two poles of transformation of the landscape—into an aggregation of alluringly expressive and visually captivating, yet almost unconnected features on the one hand, or into an undiversified plain on the other—will be seen to recur in various forms throughout Clare's work.

In this particular poem, it should finally be noticed, the subversive nature of these transformations is undermined by their explicit connection with winter (in the first and twenty-fifth lines). The unquestioned acceptance of the eternal seasonal cycle provides a basis of secure knowledge, the certainty of an eventual return to a ‘green’ world. Such confidence in the circular nature of time is of course fundamental to agricultural life, and while it informs much of Clare's poetry it is most clearly enshrined in The Shepherds Calendar. However, despite this faith in annual renewal, the changing seasons profoundly affect modes of perception. ‘October’ (Shepherds Calendar, pp. 111-15), which consists of an astonishing catalogue (over a hundred lines) of natural detail observed by the wandering poet and expressed mainly in Clare's characteristically vital adjectival participles—from ‘The free horse rustling through the stubble land’ to ‘a solitary boy / Journeying and muttering oer his dreams of joy’—opens with a warning that autumn will bring an end to this sort of particularity:

Nature now spreads around in dreary hue
A pall to cover all that summer knew

‘November’ (Shepherds Calendar, pp. 116-23) does indeed bring a landscape more radically defamiliarised even than that of ‘Snow Storm’, as ‘The village sleeps in mist from morn till noon’. The ‘shepherds in the fields’ are ‘blindfold’, deprived of their anchoring points of bush, tree and sky; even their secure knowledge of the sun is challenged by its resemblance to the pale moon.

This sense of dislocation is repeatedly related to the disruption of agricultural work, which is dependent on vision. The shepherds are reduced at once to ‘Whistling aloud by guess to flocks they cannot see’, while eventually

winter comes in earnest to fulfill
Her yearly task at bleak novembers close
And stops the plough and hides the field in snows
When frost locks up the streams in chill delay

Only the threshers can continue work, and the implication that the fields themselves—like the streams—no longer function recalls the earlier move away from their ‘dreary nakedness’ to the farmyards ‘Where toils rude uproar hums from morn till night’. We are here promised ‘many rural sounds and rural sights’ but this is modified to ‘Noises’ and, later, ‘rural sounds’; and the principal form of perception in these two stanzas is indeed auditory (the only strikingly visual description is that of ‘The pigeon wi its breast of many hues / That spangles to the sun’—less than convincing in view of the prevailing weather). This move away from sight reinforces the distancing from the fields, as does the emphasis on confinement—we hear the ‘field-free’ bull, but the ‘barking mastiff’ is presumably chained to his kennel, while the turkey and geese's bid for ‘freedom’ through the ‘opening gate’ is halted by the ‘clowns whip’. Farming practice is threatened more violently in the following stanza, intensifying the claustrophobia of confinement and leading in turn to a negation of vision: when the ‘puddock’ (buzzard or kite) swoops overhead, the penned chicks, who have strayed from their mother,

                    skulk and scatter neath her wings agen
Nor peeps no more till they have saild away

V

Ideas of long-term decay in The Shepherds Calendar tend to be located in the passing of family rituals (the telling of winter tales) and of village customs (May celebrations). In ‘Remembrances’ (Midsummer Cushion, pp. 369-71) it is not only the habits of childhood (or their memory) which are threatened but also their very location. The customs of the past are immediately labelled ‘summer pleasures’, assailed now by autumn and winter. In the sixth stanza we read of ‘boyhoods pleasing haunts like a blossom’ which has shrivelled to a weed; the ‘winter’ metaphor achieves a literal reality in the appearance of the fields as ‘sudden bare’ and the onset of cloudy winter weather. The hanging moles are again literal and observable, yet emblematic of the betrayal of nature and innocence. Like Round-Oak Waters, Langley Bush was a real place on the edge of Helpston parish. ‘Little field’ and ‘sneap green’ were presumably familiar names used by Clare and his contemporaries to refer to specific places, as were ‘crossberry way’ and ‘old round oaks narrow lane’. As in much of Clare's work, notably The Shepherds Calendar, place and custom prove inseparable, and the naming of his childhood games—‘“clink & bandy” “chock” & “taw” & “ducking stone”’—and even his remembered calls to his imaginary team of horses—‘“Gee hep” & “hoit” & “woi”’—are personal particulars which enliven (or resurrect) the scene. Despite his efforts, however, the poet feels the unsustainable pressure which the sadness of his loss puts on his powers of linguistic re-creation:

O words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away
The ancient pulpit trees & the play

Later the metaphor collapses to simile as the impossibility of recovery is accepted: ‘hollow trees like pulpits I shall never see again’. Even Clare's fiercely local dialect here implies defeat and destruction as ‘the little mouldywharps hang sweeing to the wind’.

In the fifth stanza Clare attempts to describe the spatial dislocation caused by a literal levelling of the terrain which had been frequented in childhood:

All leveled like a desert by the never weary plough
All vanished like the sun where that cloud is passing now

It is uncertain whether the cloud is simply passing in front of the sun, or whether its shadow, moving along the ground as in several other poems of Clare, is at the very moment of description marking the precise former location of the flattened ‘hills’. What is clear, though, is that the sun has disappeared, and in the further context of the ‘desert’ we see here some of the first stirrings of Clare's apocalyptic vision. It is towards this bleak and oppressive sense of an imposed wasteland, stripped of local detail and customs, that the poem's ‘decay’ seems to lead.

‘Remembrances’ ends with a common device in Clare's writing: an extension of love verse to incorporate a sense of temporal as well as romantic loss. Had he realised that joy would escape him in his adult life, claims the poet, he would have ‘wooed her like a lover by my lonely side to stay’. The emphasis is on the proposed ability of poetry to delay the passing of happiness by providing a direct representation of nature. We are clearly pointed to the etymological connection between ‘poesy’ and ‘posey’:

& gave her heart my poesys all cropt in a sunny hour
As keepsakes & pledges all to never fade away
But love never heeded to treasure up the may

This is a generic transformation of the specific memories encountered earlier in the poem into the conjectural relations of allegorical figures of love, beauty, joy and the lonely poet.

This device is repeated in ‘Decay A Ballad’ (Midsummer Cushion, pp. 359-60), written, like ‘Remembrances’, around the time of Clare's move from Helpston to the neighbouring village of Northborough. What is regretted, as elsewhere, is the loss of intense emotion (‘Loves sun went down without a frown / For very joy it used to grieve us’). Each stanza ends with a refrain, emphasizing the failure of representation as a means of preservation, and formed by variations on the first and third lines of the poem:

O poesy is on the wane
For fancys visions all unfitting
I hardly know her face again
Nature herself seems on the flitting

The poem is peculiar in its complex interweaving of representation and reality. The demise of poetry here seems to relate more to the fading of ‘fancys visions’ than of nature itself, but the later references to the poet's belief that the flowers of his youth were ‘from Adams open gardens’ suggests a Fall from ideal beauty. Decay is indeed universal, destroying flowers, vision, day and friendship as well as poetry and love. The effect is more of confusion than of controlled ambiguity.

In response to his (unexplained) ‘fading vision’ Clare expresses nostalgia for the sort of constructions of fancy which have themselves elsewhere had a delocalising effect:

Gone gone is raptures flooding gushes
When mushrooms they were fairy bowers
Their marble pillars overswelling

The vocabulary oozes that imaginative fecundity which ‘Snow Storm’ worked to discount, and from which, in the extracts from ‘March’ and ‘December’ of The Shepherd's Calendar discussed above, the poet distances himself by means of intermediary characters. The fourth stanza crystallises the ambiguity caused by this sudden retrospective acceptance of practices of false figuration. The transposition of foreign landscapes onto that of familiar, local observation necessarily creates a sense of homelessness:

The sun those mornings used to find
When clouds were other-country-mountains
& heaven looked upon the mind
With groves & rocks & mottled fountains
These heavens are gone—the mountains gray
Turned mist—the sun a homeless ranger
Pursuing on a naked way
Unnoticed like a very stranger

This obscure reference to ‘the mind’ points towards the wild and unknowable inner landscape described in ‘There is a chasm … ’. Here, though, the poet is concerned explicitly with the outer scenery of his youth as contrasted with its appearance in his manhood. The change from ‘mountains’ to ‘mist’ and nakedness is in fact a reprise of the two forms of defamiliarisation evident in ‘Snow Storm’: imaginary constructions, and blanket uniformity. Clare thus conjectures a process of decay in the sequence of two forms of false perception which have both in reality consistently challenged his preference for specific observation.

The image of the sun as a stranger relates more directly to the move to Northborough. In Clare's childhood and youth, his common desire to wander was tempered by an extreme sense of spatial dislocation when only a small way from home. This theme is repeated in ‘The Flitting’ (Midsummer Cushion, pp. 216-21)—‘The sun een seems to loose its way / Nor knows the quarter it is in’. Here the poet's expression of spatial dislocation gives way to a disparagement of literature concerned with ‘pomps of chivalry’ rather than the genuine nature which (Clare claims) was recognised by David, and which coexisted with Adam, Eve and Abel. These biblical references seek to express the eternal and unchanging presence of nature, which is surely less than the truth for a poet who has lived through the transformations of enclosure. When the references move on to Naiads and muses we have to recall Clare's own criticism of Keats:

when he speaks of woods Dryads & Fawns are sure to follow & the brook looks alone without her naiads yet the frequency of such classical accompaniment makes it wearisome to the reader where behind every rose bush he looks for a Venus & under every laurel a thrumming Appollo

Clare's new appreciation of nature as the same everywhere clearly entails the loss of his celebrated local intensity. In a passage which serves as a heavy modification of his reference to words as ‘poor receipts’ (in ‘Remembrances’), he implies that he can conquer the diffraction of memory embodied in the quotation marks which have appeared round the name of a flower:

this “shepherds purse” that grows
In this strange spot—In days gone bye
Grew in the little garden rows
Of my old home now left

Adopting the weed as an ‘ancient neighbour’ he claims that it is still formed uniquely by its particular features—‘Its every trifle makes it dear’—but we see instead an increasingly generalised nature, whose personal significance relies principally on past associations.

The conflict between the widespread critical reception of Clare as unselfconscious and his evident late concern with questions of identity has drawn attention from the thematic continuities of his work. His self-awareness is fixed consistently in his relationship with the natural world; and challenges to the familiarity of that world serve at the same time to undermine the possibility of its accurate poetic representation. The permanent and systematic changes brought to Clare's terrain by enclosure—akin in his perceptual terms to a perpetual winter—increased his reliance on memory and poetry as means of preserving the past. In his work after leaving Helpston his sense of confusion and slippage between different notions of time and representation becomes entangled in enormous religious and social insecurity. In ‘I Am’ (Later Poems, I, 396-7) the poet's desire for familiar anchoring points—‘The grass below—above the vaulted sky’—is linked to his wish to escape society itself and the destabilising emotions with which he has come to asssociate women, and to return instead to an unimpeded relationship with God, and a state of childlike innocence. The unattainable simplicity of this fixed positioning is in fact dwarfed by the metaphorical landscape of personal failure—‘the vast shipwreck of my lifes esteems’. The destruction of identity and of landscape in these poems is mutually assured.

Notes

1. John Ashbery, Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 103.

2. Edward Strickland, ‘John Clare and the Sublime’, Criticism, 29, no. 2 (1987), 141-61.