SOURCE: “The Shepherd's Calendar” in ‘A Real World and Doubting Mind’: A Critical Study of the Poetry of John Clare, Hull University Press, 1985, pp. 34-68.

[In the following essay, Chilcott presents a close study of the structure of The Shepherd's Calendar.]

In January 1820, less than a week after the appearance of Clare's first volume, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, his publisher John Taylor wrote to him greatly approving his idea for a poem to be entitled ‘A Week in a Village’. In order to create an overall structure for the work, Taylor suggested that he might

divide the Week's Employments into the 7 Days, selecting such for each as might particularly apply to that Day, which is the Case with some of the Occupations;—that the remaining which might be pursued in any Day should be allotted so as to fill up the Time;—that the Sports, & Amusements should in like manner be apportioned out into the 7 Days;—and that one little appropriate Story should be involved in each Day's Description.—¹

Although this particular plan was never realized, Taylor's proposal for a poem of considerable length was not forgotten, and over three years later, he wrote with a variation upon his earlier suggestion:

Talking the other Day with Hessey, it occurred to me that a good Title for another Work would be The Shepherd's Calendar—a Name which Spenser took for a Poem or rather Collection of Poems of his.—It might be like his divided into Months, & under each might be given a descriptive Poem & a Narrative Poem.²

The twelve narrative pieces proposed as an accompaniment to the descriptive verse were in fact never completed; and when the volume was eventually published in 1827, only four tales, grouped separately under the general heading of ‘Village Stories’, appeared. But in all other respects, the treatment suggested by Taylor remained as the formal design within which Clare was to write his first long poem. Such a structure was not original, as Taylor recognized. Even without the model of Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar, Clare inherited from eighteenth-century literature an extensive tradition of georgic poetry based upon the distinctive characteristics of the four seasons, or of individual months or particular times of day. At the centre of the tradition lay Thomson's The Seasons, the work which, together with songs and ballads, had the greatest influence upon his early poetic development.³ Thomson's vindication of natural description as a legitimate subject-matter for poetry was expressed within an explicit structure of cyclic change, and one of the major impetuses he gave to the organisation of descriptive verse was to relate the realm of space with that of time. The eye's movements over the landscape were recorded within a framework of seasonal variation, and events such as storms, sunrises and sunsets radically transformed as the temporal focus shifted.⁴ In many cases, the host of lesser imitations that followed Thomson's model subscribed to a similar structure. Hugh Mulligan's ‘The Months, six tinted sketches’ (1788) organised its conventional descriptions within the six months of February, April, June, August, October and December. James Hurdis's The Favourite Village (1800) was divided into the four seasons, as was Robert Bloomfield's immensely successful The Farmer's Boy, which appeared in the same year. James Grahame's The Rural Calendar (1797) portrayed the human and natural landscape in monthly sections, as did William Cole's A Descriptive Review of the year 1799. In these poems, and in the many others that pursued a similar descriptive goal, the processes of time in nature became a conventional principle of organisation.⁵

In adopting the pattern of month-by-month description for his poem, then, Clare was following established procedures. What is more revolutionary, however, is the break achieved in The Shepherd's Calendar from the traditional pieties that inform many of the earlier attempts in the genre. If there is a common denominator that unites the work of Hurdis and Bloomfield, Cole and Grahame, James Woodhouse and Stephen Duck, it is the impression conveyed of a poetry contriving its responses. It is the verse of men who are either so far from the soil that they can portray it only in terms of a tinsel pastoralism, or so close to it that they feel obliged to wipe the dirt from their hands through periphrasis and literary gesture. The characteristic attitude is one of sentimental apostrophe; the characteristic effect that of potentially accurate description blurred by moralistic appeal. In The Shepherd's Calendar, however, Clare forcefully invigorates a dying tradition, animating it with an underlying pressure of felt reality. The rhetorical stance sometimes found in the pre-1821 poetry (‘Hail, humble Helpstone’) is now much less frequent, as is the ratification of experience by allusion to earlier literary models. That the poem continues to reveal several of the weaknesses apparent in his earliest work is unquestionable; but it is nevertheless the first substantial poem in which a distinctive cogency of voice begins to emerge. The kinds of perception underlying the poetry of his apprenticeship here take on a new clarity and purpose.

In the first chapter [of ‘A Real World and Doubting Mind’], I placed some emphasis upon the importance of an oral rather than written tradition in Clare's early development; and the vocal aspects of The Shepherd's Calendar reveal the continuing influence of the spoken language upon his imagination. The influence is manifest in a number of ways. In contrast to many pre-1821 poems, for instance, there is an increasing use of Northamptonshire and more general dialectical forms that derive much of their strength from the spoken rather than written word:⁶ drabble, edding, morts, pooty, swaily, swop, younker, and so forth. A number of such terms, moreover, are clearly ideophonic, producing onomatopoeic or other sound-symbolic effects. Words such as ‘croodling’, ‘crizzling’, ‘crumpt’, ‘swee’, ‘scutter’, ‘slive’ convey the muscular enactment of meaning in the mouth, the tactile energy of a heard language. Such speech, too, has resources which allow for considerable discrimination in the recording of natural sounds: an aural precision that is able to establish the nuances between, for example, the ‘wherrying’ of ducks, the ‘whewing’ of starlings, the ‘whirl’ of peewits, and the ‘wizzing’ of stockdoves.

The influence of the spoken language, it is worth noting, extends beyond the incidental use of dialectical or ideophonic terms that generate a more than usual acoustic resonance. Whole passages can be orchestrated into a more extensive sonority. One of the finest examples occurs in the ‘October’ section of the poem, where Clare depicts the rising of a storm:

The flying clouds urged on in swiftest pace
Like living things as if they runned a race
The winds that oer each coming tempest broods
Waking like spirits in their startling moods
Fluttering the sear leaves on the blasting lea
That litters under every fading tree
& pausing oft as falls the pattering rain
Then gathering strength & twirling them again
The startld stockdove hurried wizzing bye
As the still hawk hangs oer him in the sky
Crows from the oak trees qawking as they spring
Dashing the acorns down wi beating wing
Waking the woodlands sleep in noises low
Pattring the crimpt brakes withering brown below
While from their hollow nest the squirrels pop
Adown the tree to pick them as they drop
The starnel crowds that dim the muddy light
The crows & jackdaws flapping home at night
& puddock circling round its lazy flight
Round the wild sweeing wood in motion slow
Before it perches on the oaks below
& hugh black beetles revelling alone
In the dull evening with their heavy drone
Buzzing from barn door straw & hovel sides
Where foddered cattle from the night abides

(SC [The Shepherd's Calendar, ed. Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield, (London: Oxford University Press, 1967)], 114-5)

It does not need a specialised analysis of the phonetic patterns in this extract to recognise at once its remarkable acoustic vitality. Sound energises the entire passage. Onomatopoeic effects are present in words like ‘wizzing’, ‘qawking’, ‘pattring’ and ‘buzzing’. The frequent alliteration of letters such as ‘s’, ‘l’, and ‘w’ (spirits, startling, sear; leaves, lea, litters, and so on) is further orchestrated as they appear in the middle and at the ends of words (tempest, broods, blasting, clouds). The flow of vowel sounds is often obstructed by consonantal clusters (‘The startld stockdove hurried wizzing bye’). Throughout, vowels and consonants set up intricate effects of vocal relationship and resistance, so much so that the sound pattern of the rhyming couplet seems barely able to contain them. Elsewhere in Clare's poetry, it is worth noting, the frequent use of the couplet form often evokes an auditory world of balance and limits, of channelled energy as it were. The rhymes arouse and then fulfil the expectation of the ear. But here, the prevailing effect is of sounds overlapping and interweaving with each other, scarcely controllable, so it seems, by the formal pattern of the rhyming couplet.

It would be excessive to claim that the auditory richness of this passage is sustained throughout The Shepherd's Calendar, for the very subject matter of the rising storm provides Clare with notable opportunities to exploit the acoustic potential of his material. But the extract shows at least that oral influence in the poem is not confined to the intermittent use of ideophonic or dialect words. Extended passages can be fashioned by an aural impulse, by the kind of language that the Dorset poet William Barnes evocatively described as ‘shapen of the breath-sounds of speakers, for the ear of hearers, and not from speech-tokens in books'.⁷ In such language, the central impulse of the human voice is manifest.

There is little question that, in a more general sense, the world of sound depicted in The Shepherd's Calendar continues to show the same qualities of stable, coherent awareness as is revealed in the earliest poetry. Despite the chaos of noise in the storm scene, no impression is conveyed that Clare does not understand, as it were, what is happening. Indeed, as a poem written during the same period as the Calendar makes clear, his very ability to reproduce the sounds of the natural world is one means by which the original act of perception is confirmed. In ‘The Progress of Rhyme’, he devotes a number of lines to imitating the noises of bird calls:

—& nightingales O I have stood
Beside the pingle & the wood
& oer the old oak railing hung
To listen every note they sung …
—“Chew-chew chew-chew”—& higher still
“Cheer-cheer cheer-cheer” more loud & shrill
“Cheer-up cheer-up cheer-up”—& dropt
Low “Tweet tweet jug jug jug” …
                                        & then a round
Of stranger witching notes was heard
As if it was a stranger bird
“Wew-wew wew-wew chur-chur chur-chur
“Woo-it woo-it”—could this be her
“Tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew
“Chew-rit chew-rit”—& ever new
“Will-will will-will grig-grig grig-grig”

(MC [John Clare: The Midsummer Cushion, ed. Anne Tibble and R.K.R. Thornton (Mid-Northumberland Arts Group in association with Carcanet Press, 1979)], 229)

The interest of this passage lies not only in the remarkable acoustic accuracy of the transcription but in the fact that the birds’ sounds, like the noises of animals and insects that appear throughout the poem, are part of a known universe; and in so far as they can be reproduced mimetically in poetry, they endorse the intimate connection between word and thing. There are, however, two aspects of his rendering of sound that are worth noting at this point, since although they appear in the poem only rarely, they begin to suggest a less assured kind of aural awareness. In ‘March’, he describes a shepherd boy beguiling his loneliness with ‘fancy thoughts’:

He hears the wild geese gabble oer his head
& pleased wi fancys in his musings bred
He marks the figurd forms in which they flye
& 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

(SC, 33)

This is one of the rare instances in the poem in which a human figure is shown gazing at objects above the horizontal plane; and it is significant that Clare does not initially stress here the vastness or separateness of the sky. Indeed, the boy is depicted as giving the flight of geese a human pattern, an intelligible order, as their changing formations are likened to the letters of the alphabet. But if the act of seeing in these lines suggests at first a relative coherence of perception, the act of hearing produces more uncertain effects. It is not merely that the sounds isolated (‘gabble’, ‘cranking’, ‘jarring’, ‘mellancholy cry’) are intrinsically dissonant, though this may play a part, nor only that the crane's solitary cry seems to resist the promise of spring implicit in the ‘unfrozen dykes’, but also that such sounds cannot be localised. Unlike the ‘figurd forms’ of the wild geese, which are ‘marked’ in a defined space, the noise of the crane cannot be thus delimited. Its sound comes from some direction that is merely described as ‘far above’. The ‘ing’ morphemes of ‘cranking’ and ‘jarring’, combined with the four syllables of ‘mellancholy’, have the effect of drawing the sounds out and beyond the confines of the single line, until they seem, almost, to echo throughout the vast expanse of the ‘cheerless sky’.

The effect of sound in this passage is to create, momentarily, a dual perspective. What the boy sees are ‘figurd forms’, a visual order in the natural world. What he hears is a nature considerably less patterned and ‘localisable’. An extension upon this contrast is to be found in the concluding stanza of ‘February’:

Nature soon sickens of her joys
& all is sad & dumb again
Save merry shouts of sliding boys
About the frozen furrowd plain
The foddering boy forgets his song
& silent goes wi folded arms
& croodling shepherds bend along
Crouching to the whizzing storms

(SC, 28)

The overt contrast here, now between sound and silence rather than sound and sight, intimates an even deeper antithesis between natural and human planes. In the first four lines, the ‘merry shouts’ of the boys sliding on the ice evoke a human vitality that contrasts strongly with the dumbness and torpor of the natural environment. But between the two quatrains, the community of boys at play is abruptly transformed into the isolated ‘foddering boy’, whose silence is seen as a forgetting of song. Sound is now the property of natural forces which drive human figures into physical subservience. Moreover, the very noise itself (‘whizzing’) reverberates ominously, not dissimilar in its impact from the ‘howling storm’ of Blake's ‘The Sick Rose’—a noise that seems closer to dream or menacing fantasy than to intelligible reality.

In both of these passages, then, sound expresses for a moment a more uncertain perception, as a fugitive realm at the edges of understanding is glimpsed. Mimetic accuracy is temporarily infiltrated by unexplained implication. In the context of the whole of The Shepherd's Calendar, undoubtedly, such moments are infrequent; but they are the signs of a different impulse in Clare's presentation of the phenomenal world. It is in his depiction of things seen that this impulse is to be found again, under a different aspect.

In a foolscap volume belonging to the period 1821-4, which contains Clare's rough drafts for many of the sections of The Shepherd's Calendar, there occurs a sonnet addressed to Peter De Wint, the artist who drew the original etching for the engraving that prefaced the book:

Dewint I would not flatter nor would I
Pretend to critic skill in this thine art
Yet in thy landscapes I can well descry
Thy breathing hues as natures counterpart
No painted freaks—no wild romantic sky
No rocks nor mountains as the rich sublime
Hath made thee famous but the sunny truth
Of nature that doth mark thee for all time
Found on our level pastures spots forsooth
Where common skill sees nothing deemed divine
Yet here a worshipper was found in thee
Where thy young pencil worked such rich surprise
That rushy flats befringed with willow tree
Rival’d the beauties of italian skies

(MC, 404)

It was during his first visit to London in 1820 that Clare became acquainted with De Wint's pictures, and several references in his letters testify to the interest he took in the painter's approach to landscape.⁸ Of Dutch ancestry, and brought up in East Anglia, De Wint shared with Clare a fascination with the level terrain of the fens; and although the sonnet is clearly laudatory in intent, there is no reason to doubt that the pictorial contrast Clare draws is one genuinely felt.⁹ Rejecting the extravagant sublimities of the characteristic Romantic landscape, with its rocks, skies and mountains, he emphasises the ‘sunny truth’ to be discerned in ‘level pastures’ and ‘rushy flats’, a perspective which works upon horizontal planes of vision rather than vertical. Indeed, the difference between horizontal and vertical lines provides a significant clue towards understanding his preference for De Wint's approach. The peaks, skies, rocks and mountains of the landscapes he disfavours are, presumably, apprehended chiefly as perpendicular structures; they require that the eye look upwards from the level horizontal plane in order that the relative size and importance of objects may be judged. De Wint's canvasses, however, by concentrating upon the flatness of the East Anglian fen landscape, allow the eye to remain relatively fixed on the same plane of vision. It may advance ‘into’ the picture, and is thus not static, but it is not required to move vertically in order to appreciate the landscape.

Much in this sonnet reiterates Clare's early preference for looking along or below the horizontal line of vision, which was discussed in the first chapter. But the poem also mentions a further aspect of De Wint's pictorial design that is more paradoxical. In the penultimate line, Clare appears to endorse the way in which the ‘rushy flats’ are ‘befringed with willow tree’; and his use of the word ‘befringed’ suggests that he recognises the need to frame or at least contain the fen landscape by the introduction of some other natural object at the edge of the canvas. In his ‘Essay on Landscape’, however, written at roughly the same period as the sonnet, he explicitly praises De Wint for the absence of framing devices in his paintings:

there is no harsh stoppage no bounds to space or any outline further then there is in nature—if we could possibly walk into the picture we fancy we might pursue the landscape beyond those mysterys (not bounds) assigned it so as we can in the fields—

(Prose [The Prose of John Clare, ed. J.W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951)], 211)¹⁰

What he is evidently endorsing here is a pictorial design that is not self-contained or controlled by artificially imposed boundaries of perspective; and the essay makes it clear that he has two such structures in mind. There is firstly the confining limit of the actual edge of the painting itself; and secondly, the false patterning created by placing objects within the frame so as to contrive a perspective. This latter effect he particularly condemns:

There is no worse trickery of disposal of lights & shadows to catch the eye from object to object with excessive fractions of diminishings untill the eye rest upon the last pinspoint effect that makes a tree appear a mile high & the neighbouring back ground a mile off—

(Prose, 211)

This, it needs to be stressed, is not an attack upon perspective as such, but upon the deliberate positioning of objects so as to create the illusion of perspective; for the work of art is then controlled by the pressures of artistic design rather than by the informal aspects of natural growth it purports to represent.¹¹ Such contrivance, moreover, is closely associated in his mind with the visual artificiality which renders all objects of a certain species the same. He instances trees:

you may know several Artists by the style of their trees some trim them in uniforms & regulars & every tree is the facsimile of its fellow. … Others make gnarled & knotched & broken trunks with a witherd bough & a green one throwing their curdled arms half over the landscape & this serves for every picture in which trees are introduced & become[s] the style of the artist— … the green draperys of a sunny forest astonish the observer with their harmony & diversity of green yet when we look upon a painting we see nothing but a uniformity

(Prose, 212-13)

Despite the reference to ‘befringed with willow tree’ in the sonnet to De Wint, then, Clare appears in this essay to endorse paintings which, while accurately portraying the diversity of the natural landscape, allow the eye at the same time to move beyond the precisely articulated visual frame; and it is this motion between focus and fringe, between definition and what he calls ‘mysterys’, that creates one of the most significant visual tensions in The Shepherd's Calendar. An extract from the first version of ‘July’ demonstrates the nature of this tension. He begins by describing the antics of a dog playing:

& head oer heels he danses in
Nor fears to wet his curly skin
The boys field cudgel to restore
& brings it in his mouth ashore
& eager as for crust or bone
He ll run to catch the pelted stone
Till wearied out he shakes his hide
& drops his tail & sneaks aside
Unheeding whistles shouts & calls
To take a rest where thickly falls
The rush clumps shadows there he lyes
Licking his skin & catching flyes
Or picking tween his stretching feet
The bone he had not time to eat
Before when wi the teazing boy
He was so throngd wi plays employ
Noon gathers wi its blistering breath
Around & days dyes still as death
The breeze is stopt the lazy bough
Hath not a leaf that dances now
The totter grass upon the hill
& spiders threads is hanging still
The feathers dropt from morehens wings
Upon the waters surface clings
As stedfast & as heavy seem
As stones beneath them in the stream
Hawkweed & groundsels fairey downs
Unruffld keep their seeding crowns
& in the oven heated air
Not one light thing is floating there
Save that to the earnest eye
The restless heat swims twittering bye

(SC, 80-1)¹²

This is a passage which, perhaps more strikingly than any other in the poem, presents two very different kinds of visual perception; and the abrupt transition between the dog's antics and the ‘blistering breath’ of noon serves only to heighten the basic contrast. Before the mid-day heat descends, the details of the dog playing are consistently portrayed within a sharply focussed foreground. Its skin, the cudgel, the stone, the flies, the bone—all details have a similar visual weight, all seem to exist on the same perspectival plane. No impression is created, for example, that he sees the dog's shaking its hide with a greater concentration than its catching the stone; nor is there any indication whether its resting by the ‘rush clumps’ represents a movement towards or away from the eye. There is, likewise, no difference in the degree of brightness reflected by each object. Even when the dog ‘sneaks aside’ to the thick shadows of the rushes, its actions continue to be seen as clearly as when it races in sunlight. Indeed, Clare's desire, it seems, is not so much to depict only what can be seen but to express all that he knows.

The change between this kind of uniform, inclusive perception and the mode of seeing evoked by the noonday heat is both sudden and fundamental; and the final sixteen lines achieve a similar impact to that of the very early poem ‘Noon’, discussed in chapter one. The claustrophobic heat is now allied to a continual shifting of visual emphasis, from focus to blur, from close-up to more distant viewpoints, from the concentration of the ‘earnest eye’ to the more relaxed, unfocused act of seeing implicit in the ‘oven heated air’. The reference to the ‘spiders threads … hanging still’, for example, evokes an image of sharply defined outlines, seen from exceptionally close range, as does the mention of the ‘seeding crowns’ of hawkweed and groundsel. The distinctness of these objects, however, is counterposed against the fluctuating tensions of light, as objects are merged within the shimmering heat-haze and become indeterminate in shape and contour. Nor is it simply the outlines of objects that are diffused. The eye's capacity to judge the solidity and weight of natural objects, even to know its own function, is also affected. The moorhen's feathers, unmoving on the still water, appear as heavy as stones; and the eye, even when seeking concentratedly for a solid object on which to rest, is partially transformed in function, taking on some of the properties of hearing in the synaesthesia of the ‘twittering’ restless heat.

The relationship between this passage and Clare's ‘Essay on Landscape’ may now have begun to emerge, for the different modes of visual awareness present in ‘July’ closely mirror his distinction between the ‘harsh stoppage’ of the framed landscape and the more fluid visual texture suggested by the term ‘mysterys’. Ironically, the description of the dog's antics creates an effect comparable to the self-contained, bounded perspective he decries in painting. Details are regularised and undiscriminated. They stand firmly localised within the confinement of each line: one action or object is mentioned and then set aside as the next action or object is noted, and so forth. In the description of the heat-haze, however, each detail expands beyond its fixed position in the line to create complex patterns of focus and indistinctness, closeness and distance, throughout the passage. He directs his attention towards the peripheries of vision, towards the edges as well as the centre of sight.

The broader implications of this movement away from a visual centre are suggested by a comparable passage from the ‘November’ section of the poem:

The village sleeps in mist from morn till noon
& if the sun wades thro tis wi a face
Beamless & pale & round as if the moon
When done the journey of its nightly race
Had found him sleeping & supplyd his place
For days the shepherds in the fields may be
Nor mark a patch of sky—blindfold they trace
The plains that seem wi out a bush or tree
Wistling aloud by guess to flocks they cannot see

(SC, 116)

Although the light portrayed in this stanza is far less intense than the dazzling heat-haze of ‘July’, both passages depict a similar refraction of sight. The eye here is unable to ‘mark’ objects, to render them as solid phenomena within a known environment. Instead, the verse dramatises the uncertainty of sight and its attendant effects of provisional, hypothetical existence. The repetition of ‘if’ clauses, the emphasis upon negative actions and conditions (‘Nor mark’, ‘The plains that seem wi out’, ‘flocks they cannot see’), the stress upon the impotence of light (‘mist’, ‘beamless’, ‘pale’, ‘blindfold’)—all these features evoke the basic indeterminancy of the visual sense. And indeed, it is precisely because the eye cannot fix upon solid objects, upon a defined space, that both passages begin to intimate a kind of perception beyond the purely declarative and explicit.

The tentativeness with which I express this idea (‘begin to intimate a kind of perception’) is deliberate, for the task of defining this other level of awareness is far from simple. In fact, as is often the case, it is easier to indicate what is not happening in the stanza. It seems clear, for example, that Clare is not seeking here to imitate any system of analogical correspondence, wherein the blindness of the shepherds is explicitly illustrative of some similar darkness in the natural, moral or spiritual worlds. The physical act of seeing in both ‘July’ and ‘November’ is not used as a convenient vehicle for moral application, as can sometimes happen in Thomson:

heavens! what a goodly Prospect
spreads around,
Of Hills, and Dales, and Woods, and Lawns, and Spires,
And glittering Towns, and gilded Streams, till all
The stretching Landskip into Smoke decays!
Happy britannia! where the queen of arts,
Inspiring Vigor, liberty abroad
Walks, unconfin’d, even to thy farthest Cotts,
And scatters Plenty with unsparing Hand.

(‘Summer’, 1746, 1438-45)¹³

The bifurcation in these lines between the objects of physical sight and the studied reflections they generate may well be an indication, as Earl Wasserman has argued about the eighteenth-century descriptive-moral poem in general,¹⁴ that Thomson here is not so much thinking analogically as thinking about analogical relationships. Yet it is evident that Clare's depiction of sight in ‘November’ has none of the deliberateness with which Thomson fashions his analogy. Nor, to state the matter in slightly different terms, does it seem as if Clare is working towards figurative rather than literal statement. To claim, in the words of one critic, that ‘the “beamless” rays of the sun, the great eye of the universe, evoke a terrible natural blindness which finds its human counterparts in the shepherds'¹⁵ is to derive too explicit a metaphor from the stanza. Sight in The Shepherd's Calendar does not yield so readily to insight. Rather, the mists of ‘November’ remain firmly located within the phenomenal world. But for a moment, the phenomenal is not automatically equated with the secure. Even within the material realm, natural processes can appear to be weakened or frustrated. In ‘July’, the day ‘dyes still as death’; in ‘November’, the moon seems to have usurped the sun as the creator of daylight. Physical objects, likewise, temporarily move from their definable positions in the landscape. They shift in the shimmering heat-haze or disappear entirely in the November mists. As with the ‘cranking’ crane and ‘whizzing storms’ of ‘February’ and ‘March’, to perceive the material world is, in these brief instants, not to fix it in a steady knowledge. It is to recognise flux as well as coherence, insecurities as well as assurances. In the 1830s and 1840s, as later chapters will show, this kind of impulse is to become increasingly insistent.

In the examination so far of the imaginative structures evident in Clare's early poetry, I have made several incidental references to certain features of his language; and I want now to explore this aspect of his poetry rather more fully, in order to highlight its distinctive qualities. Few features of Clare's early style have been more commonly commented upon than its ‘simplicity’; though few characterisations perhaps have been more often proffered as self-explanatory, the concluding rather than starting point of discussion. In factual terms, one of the clearest correlatives of ‘simplicity’ in language, as Marie Borroff has argued,¹⁶ is word length—the frequency with which the monosyllabic word is preferred to the di- or tri-syllabic:

& as they rode she wished him speke
& not a word spoke he
You were not wont loved knight she said
To be this cold to me

(JCFT [John Clare and the Folk Tradition, ed. George Beacon (London: Sinclair Browne, 1983)], 173)

Clearly, one of the major ways in which this stanza from ‘The False Knights Tragedy’ creates its effects is through its monosyllabic spareness; and in the poem as a whole, nine words out of every ten are monosyllables. Nor, it seems, is such a concentration exclusively determined by the exigencies of ballad metre and rhyme scheme, though such demands may play a part. In passages chosen at random from The Shepherd's Calendar, monosyllabic terms make up 74 per cent of the total vocabulary, compared with 69 per cent in passages of comparable length from Thomson's The Seasons.¹⁷ In view of the tendency in any writer's language for a large number of monosyllabic ‘function words’ (prepositions, conjunctions, articles and so forth) to produce a regression to the mean, the contrast between Clare and one of his eighteenth-century predecessors may be more significant than these figures might initially suggests.

Monosyllabic directness, nonetheless, is only one index of Clare's ‘simplicity’. A more striking reflection is to be found in the etymological distinctiveness of his diction. Its special qualities can best be suggested by comparing the storm-scene from ‘October’, quoted earlier in this chapter, with an extract from The Seasons that is similarly concerned with the rising and breaking of a storm:

Late, in the louring Sky, red, fiery, Streaks
Begin to flush about; the reeling Clouds
Stagger with dizzy Aim, as doubting yet
Which Master to obey: while rising, slow,
Sad, in the Leaden-colour’d East, the Moon
Wears a bleak Circle round her sully’d Orb.
Then issues forth the Storm, with loud Control,
And the thin Fabrick of the pillar’d Air
O’erturns, at once. Prone, on th’ uncertain Main,
Descends th’ Etherial Force, and plows its Waves,
With dreadful Rift: from the mid-Deep, appears,
Surge after Surge, the rising, wat’ry, War.
Whitening, the angry Billows rowl immense,
And roar their Terrors, through the shuddering Soul
Of feeble Man, amidst their Fury caught,
And, dash’d upon his Fate:

(‘Winter’, March 1726, 155-70)¹⁸

Although, thematically, this passage may well have served as a model for the storm in ‘October’, there are major stylistic differences between the two descriptions. The referential vocabulary of Thomson's evocation comprises over 40 per cent of words derived from a Romance and Latinate base. One of the expressive effects of this emphasis is to counterpoint against the uncontrollable physical energy of the storm a sense of formal distancing, an editorial perspective which interprets the scene in terms of concept and general observation as well as sensuous, immediate experience.¹⁹ Thus, although the ‘reeling Clouds / Stagger’ dizzily, clauses like ‘Prone, on th’ uncertain Main, / Descends th’ Etherial Force’, with a referential vocabulary of five Romance and Latinate derivatives to one based upon Old English and ultimately Germanic stock, create an effect of rhetorical gravity that temporarily interrupts the sensuous perception of the storm. This, I should perhaps emphasise, is not a criticism of Thomson's language, for it is in its distinctive quality as perfectly adapted to his larger imaginative concerns as Clare's is to his. But when the passage from The Seasons is placed against the storm from ‘October’, there is a clear difference in etymological bias. Only fifteen words in the extract from ‘October’ are based upon Romance and Latinate roots, proportionately about a third of Thomson's usage. The predominance of a diction derived ultimately from a Germanic base mirrors a sustained, sensuous engagement in the natural details of the scene, in details that are both unabstracted and authoritative in their simple physicality.

The implicit connection drawn in the last sentence between, on the one hand, Old English and Germanic derivatives and a concrete, common world and, on the other, Latinate and Romance terms and a more formal or conceptual apprehension, is not an invariable relationship in the English language. Some of the Romance derivatives Clare uses in ‘October’ (for instance, ‘fading’, ‘pausing’, ‘revelling’) have become so thoroughly domesticated through time that any formal or abstract expressiveness they may once have embodied has almost entirely disappeared. Nonetheless, it remains the case that his depiction of nature is often conveyed in a diction which reveals a considerable bias towards Old English and Germanic derivatives. Nor, it should be emphasised, does such a diction seem to be inevitably or exclusively ‘compelled’ by his distinctive subject-matter. If it is true that a landscape filled with trees, horses, sheep, ploughs, dogs, could scarcely be portrayed save by using exactly those Old English derivatives,²⁰ it is noticeable that the bias persists in later poems that treat more internalised experiences. In extracts from The Shepherd's Calendar, Old English and Germanic derivatives comprise 75 per cent of the referential vocabulary. In some major works of 1832, and in the asylum poem ‘Child Harold’, the bias remains remarkably consistent at 73 per cent and 74 per cent respectively. The preference, that is to say, is not only prescribed. It is also elected.

When these figures are placed against the 57 per cent of Old English and Germanic derivatives in the referential vocabulary of a section in Thomson's The Seasons, or the 64 per cent obtained from a section in Wordsworth's The Prelude,²¹ their more general significance may begin to emerge. Clearly, they in no sense prove a conscious propagandising for a so-called ‘native’ English diction in the manner of, for example, William Barnes or Gerard Manley Hopkins. Indeed, it is possible that Clare would have found Barnes's advocacy of a diction where ‘horizons’ become ‘sky-sills’ or ‘atmosphere’ ‘welkin-air’ as contrived in its own way as the artificial pastoral diction he actually decried:

Putting the Correct Language of the Gentleman into the mouth of a Simple Shepherd or Vulgar Ploughman is far from Natural—

(Letters [The Letters of John Clare, ed. J. W. and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951)], 25)

None the less, his repeated defence of his own ‘provincialisms’ and dialect during the early 1820's suggests the direction in which his diction intuitively moved throughout his career:

“Eggs on” in the “Address to a Lark”—whether provincial or not I cannot tell but it is common with the vulgar (I am of that class) & I heartily desire no word of mine to be altered²²

His distinctive justification of Wordsworth's ‘language really used by men’ is realised by instinctively capitalising upon a vocabulary derived from Old English and Germanic roots. Such a diction draws upon a reservoir of concrete objects and common activity—upon the simplicity, in other words, of known things.

If Clare's diction in The Shepherd's Calendar works for a distinctive kind of expressiveness, to an even greater extent does his syntax. In chapter one, I suggested that the distinctive time-scale of the pre-1821 verse—that sense of contemporaneous events crowding together in a single presentness—was in large part the result of a co-ordinative rather than sub-ordinative syntax; and the very first page of The Shepherd's Calendar shows that this kind of syntactic organisation continues to prevail:

Withering & keen the winter comes
While comfort flyes to close shut rooms
& sees the snow in feathers pass
Winnowing by the window glass
& unfelt tempests howl & beat
Above his head in corner seat
& musing oer the changing scene
Farmers behind the tavern screen
Sit—or wi elbow idly prest
On hob reclines the corners guest

(SC, 1)

In these opening lines to the poem, Clare continues to achieve an almost total simultaneity of reference by compounding images one upon the other and by avoiding the ordering characteristics of normal grammar and punctuation. Thus the ‘while’ of line two, which seems about to introduce a subordinate clause of contrast, in fact initiates an amalgam of co-ordinated details that are perceived at the same time as the coming of winter. Similarly, the repetition of the term ‘and’, not only to connect adjectives but more importantly to co-ordinate clauses, and especially the sudden appearance of the word ‘his’ in line six without a preceding referent, generate the impression of multiple perceptions fusing with each other, unshaped by the control of grammatical subordination.

The persistence of this kind of syntax in The Shepherd's Calendar is an indication of the continuing emphasis Clare places upon concurrence rather than relationship. It is unnecessary to show in fact that the sudden mention of ‘his head’ in line six is an anticipation of ‘the corners guest’ in line ten, since everything is perceived as a simultaneous unity. In terms of poetic effectiveness, however, this kind of structure is not without its limitations, for the absence of any syntactic centrality can lead to what has often been recognised as one of the chief deficiencies of the poem: its cataloguing of detail after detail. One of the more notable examples of such inventories occurs in ‘June’, where he describes a village girl looking for flowers:

Fine cabbage roses painted like her face
& shining pansys trimmd in golden lace
& tall tuft larkheels featherd thick wi flowers
& woodbines climbing oer the door in bowers
& London tufts of many a mottld hue
& pale pink pea & monkshood darkly blue
& white & purple jiliflowers that stay
Lingering in blossom summer half away
& single blood walls of a lucious smell
Old fashiond flowers which huswives love so well

(SC, 67)

This, it should be pointed out, is far from the end of the list, for he continues for a further sixteen lines, mentioning columbines, snapdragons, marjoram, lavender and so on, before attempting to impose some notional order with the couplet

These the maid gathers wi a coy delight
& tyes them up in readiness for night

(SC, 68)

That he recognised the dangers of this incremental syntax is evident from a rather ingenuous editorial comment which concludes a similar listing of flowers in ‘May’:

My wild field catalogue of flowers
Grows in my rhymes as thick as showers
Tedious & long as they may be
To some they never weary me

(SC, 53)

The implications of such inventories, however, are considerably more complex than the mere effect of tedium, for ultimately, they suggest a deeper imaginative problem inherited from his eighteenth-century predecessors. I can best introduce the question by placing together three passages which for the moment I will leave unidentified, though their provenance will not be difficult to recognise:

The byldere ok, and ek the hardy asshe;
The piler elm, the cofre unto carayne;
The boxtre pipere, holm to whippes lashe;
The saylynge fyr; the cipresse, deth to playne;
The shetere ew; the asp for shaftes pleyne;
The olyve of pes, and eke the dronke vyne;
The victor palm, the laurer to devyne.
Coole Violets, and Orpine growing still,
Embathed Balme, and chearfull Galingale,
Fresh Costmarie, and breathfull Camomill,
Dull Poppie, and drink-quickning Setuale,
Veyne-healing Veruen, and hed-purging Dill,
Sound Sauorie, and Bazill hartie-hale,
Fat Colworts, and comforting Perseline,
Colde Lettuce, and refreshing Rosmarine.
Bring the rathe Primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted Crow-toe, and pale Gessamine,
The white Pink, and the Pansie freakt with jet,
The glowing Violet.
The Musk-rose, and the well-attir’d Woodbine,
With Cowslips wan that hang the pensive hed,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears:

Viewed simply in terms of their syntax (which is in fact far more a parataxis), these passages appear to express a common impulse. Although in the third extract, the listing of flowers is at least notionally organised by the main verb ‘bring’, the general effect achieved in each quotation is one of steadily accumulating inventory. Each tree or flower seems to exist in its own separate moment. Each, invariably, is given an epithet that serves to distinguish it from all others of a similar species. The ash is ‘hardy’, the fir ‘saylynge’, the violets ‘cool’, the poppy ‘dull’, the primrose ‘rathe’, and so on. But this distinctiveness, it is noteworthy, in no sense implies a hierarchy. No one species or variety is more significant than another, nor is any one object perceived in a more intense foreground than another. The syntactic impulse is uncentralised, according all phenomena a similar weight and illumination, as they follow each other in the list.

At first, it may seem that there is a close relationship between Clare's inventories of flowers in ‘May’ and ‘June’ and these passages, which are taken from Chaucer's The Parliament of Fowls, Spenser's Muiopotmos: or The Fate of the Butterfly, and Milton's Lycidas respectively.²³ Certainly, the syntactic similarity is sufficient to demonstrate that, in his lists, Clare is following a long-established structural convention. At the same time, though, there are major differences between the contexts in which such catalogues appear. The lists of Chaucer and Spenser occur within the evocation of a paradisial realm, a locus amoenus that has allegoric rather than naturalistic significance. For Milton too, a wider frame of reference exists, not only of pastoral elegaic tradition but also of universal design, against which the flowers strewn over Lycidas' ‘laureate hearse’ are to be understood. All three passages, that is to say, depict natural objects, not to locate their essence in any sensory, enclosed particularity, but to point towards a suprasensory reality, an analogic landscape of the spirit that is close at hand. And it is this expansive thrust towards larger meanings that helps to impose a discipline upon the profusion of trees and plants in the extracts. A syntax which threatens to result in mere accumulation for its own sake is controlled by notions of relationship and harmony between human and divine worlds.

The difficulty facing Clare's immediate eighteenth-century predecessors, however, is that such larger meanings no longer appear automatically accessible. Concluding a similar inventory of flowers in The Seasons, Thomson offers a symptomatic response:

… Nor broad carnations, nor gay-spotted pinks;
Nor, showered from every bush, the damask-rose:
Infinite numbers, delicacies, smells,
With hues on hues expression cannot paint …

(‘Spring’, 1746, 545-51)²⁴

For Cowper, likewise,

The earth was made so various, that the mind
Of desultory man, studious of change,
And pleas’d with novelty, might be indulged.

(The Task, I, 506-8)²⁵

The key words in these passages, ‘infinite’, ‘various’, ‘change’, ‘novelty’, point towards the broader problem. As Wasserman has argued, once the concept of concordia discors, the belief in an ultimate harmony of contrary or disparate forces, becomes overtaken in the early to mid-eighteenth century by a philosophic system which stresses rather the plenitude and infinite variety of elements in the universe, it becomes increasingly difficult for poetry to embody ‘any relational order beyond the syntactical implications of language’. Lacking a firm belief in any analogical relationship between physical, moral and spiritual realms, poets can only

strive for a cosmos by cataloguing a bewildering number of the universe's numerous elements, hoping that as the catalogue grows it will ultimately imply the wholeness of multiplicity. Lacking a cosmic order by means of which to shape a poem, they can only use words to name things in an endless effort to heap up a cosmos.²⁶

In several ways, it is evident that Clare in The Shepherd's Calendar does not subscribe to any orthodox pattern, at least, of cosmic order. No mythological system, whether pagan, classical or Christian, underpins the poem as a controlling frame of reference. Neither is there any appeal to earlier hierarchical patterns such as the Great Chain of Being or notions of man as microcosm.²⁷ This is not to imply of course that in later poems or even in works of the same period as the Calendar, he does not reveal a belief in the divine or in a presiding deity. Nor, indeed, is it to argue that in The Shepherd's Calendar itself, an ultimate harmony in the scheme of things may not be intimated. But it is to suggest that whatever unity he perceives is the product of the infinite diversity of natural elements, rather than of their fixed position within an analogical structure of understanding.

This change towards a view of the universe as various and plenteous rather than harmonious helps to explain several of the distinctive stylistic features in the poem, particularly the accumulation of detail after detail without any syntactic subordination. Since it is the profusion and diversity of the natural world that he seeks to portray, rather than the distinctive relationships or discriminations between objects, a major expressive impulse is towards quantification rather than qualification. Certainly, in the catalogue of flowers in ‘June’, the different colours of monkshood and gilliflowers, ‘London tufts’ and ‘pale pink pea’ are noted; yet the emphasis falls equally, if not more, upon the sheer abundance of plants available for picking. He seeks, there as elsewhere in the poem, not so much to characterise the part as to encompass the whole. Comparison tends to give way to accumulation.

There is little doubt that this kind of stylistic pressure, and the wider view of the universe it exemplifies, presents Clare with two closely-related problems, neither of which he manages to overcome with entire success. The first difficulty, one inherent in any poetic description of nature, is noted by Johnson in his critiques of Pope's Windsor Forest and Thomson's The Seasons:

There is this want in most descriptive poems because as the scenes, which they must exhibit successively, are all subsisting at the same time, the order in which they must be shown must by necessity be arbitrary, and more is not to be expected from the last part than from the first. The attention, therefore, which cannot be detained by suspense must be excited by diversity. …

The great defect of The Seasons is want of method, but for this I know not that there was any remedy. Of many appearances subsisting all at once, no rule can be given why one should be mentioned before another; yet the memory wants the help of order, and the curiosity is not excited by suspense or expectation.²⁸

In this juxtapositioning here of readers' response with the notion of ‘truth to nature’, Johnson defines a basic problem for the descriptive poet. When the natural objects in a scene exist simultaneously, any selection of those details or any ordering of them within the unilinear structure of the poem is bound to falsify the fact that they are ‘all subsisting at the same time’. Yet to attempt to reproduce (however imperfectly) the simultaneous totality of nature can often produce a poetry of arbitrary order, where ‘the curiosity is not excited by suspense or expectation.’ It will be clear from the discussion so far that the prevailing impulse in The Shepherd's Calendar is towards this latter condition. But the fact that, as a result, ‘more is not to be expected from the last part than from the first’ points to the further difficulty Clare faces. When everything is important, emphasis is unconcentrated. The language of the poem becomes, so to speak, too proportionate. By multiplying details which are all of equal significance, it tends to normalise and neutralise them, with a consequent loss of expressive weight and pressure. In the passage from ‘July’ examined earlier, for instance, each word describing the dog's playing is invested with a comparable, separate importance. Unlike the description of the heat-haze, there is little resonance between the various phrases, no hint that, in conjunction with each other, they might generate a more syntactically centralised layer of meaning, in which patterns of discrimination and subordination, relationship and comparison, might be achieved. Like the catalogues of flowers in ‘May’ and ‘June’, everything crowds into a foreground, not only visually but also stylistically and imaginatively.

The terms in which I have described this impulse may bring to mind the characterisation of Clare's earliest poetry that was offered in chapter one: a verse in which everything is totally known and expressed, where all objects seem to advance into a foreground of the indicative. And it is true that in so far as the language of The Shepherd's Calendar creates a similar effect, it consolidates the emphasis of many pre-1821 poems. At the same time, though, there are discernible changes in stylistic texture. The use of Northamptonshire and more general dialectical forms, as has been noted, is considerably more pronounced than in the earliest verse. He speaks in an idiom that is instinctive rather than imposed. A comparison between his first poems and the Calendar shows, likewise, a change in the nature of the words he most often repeats. The major terms of poems from 1808 to 1811 suggest his debt to certain features of eighteenth-century poetry, by emphasising affective states (‘sweet’, ‘vain’, ‘dear’, ‘little’) and rather more general or abstract conditions (‘be’, ‘view’, ‘scene’, ‘life’), whereas in the later work, a vocabulary expressive of physical reality is more in evidence (‘sun’, ‘tree’, ‘wood’, ‘door’, ‘hedge’, and so forth).²⁹ There is, however, one change which is worth investigating in a little detail, since it constitutes one of the most distinctive stylistic features in The Shepherd's Calendar. It is notably illustrated in a passage cited earlier: the description of the storm from ‘October’:

The flying clouds urged on in swiftest pace
Like living things as if they runned a race
The winds that oer each coming tempest broods
Waking like spirits in their startling moods
Fluttering the sear leaves on the blasting lea
That litters under every fading tree
& pausing oft as falls the pattering rain
Then gathering strength & twirling them again

(SC, 114)

A significant aspect of these lines is the way in which present participial forms, with both adjectival and predicative force, energise the descriptive thrust: flying, living, coming, waking, startling, fluttering, blasting, fading, and so forth. Not every form bears the same imaginative weight; but within eight lines, no fewer than twelve participles occur. And the emphasis is not unique to this passage. In the first part of ‘January’, Clare portrays a thresher walking in the darkness before dawn:

Scaring the owlet from her prey
Long before she dreams of day
That blinks above head on the snow
Watching the mice that squeaks below
& foddering boys sojourn again
By ryhme hung hedge & frozen plain
Shuffling thro the sinking snows
Blowing his fingers as he goes

(SC, 2)

In ‘March’, a shepherd listens to the distant roar of rivers in flood:

Loosd from the rushing mills & river locks
Wi thundering sound & over powering shocks
& headlong hurry thro the meadow brigs
Brushing the leaning sallows fingering twigs
In feathery foam & eddy hissing chase
Rolling a storm oertaken travellers pace
From bank to bank along the meadow leas
Spreading & shining like to little seas

(SC, 29)

In ‘May’, village children, ‘mad for sport’ in their school breaks, play games:

Oft racing round the nookey church
Or calling ecchos in the porch
& jilting oer the weather cock
Viewing wi jealous eyes the clock
Oft leaping grave stones leaning hights
Uncheckt wi mellancholy sights

(SC, 47)

On average, a participial form occurs in every line of these passages;³⁰ and a comparison between The Shepherd's Calendar and the earliest poems shows how distinctive an emphasis this is. In extracts from the Calendar, present participles with a predominantly verbal force comprise almost a quarter of all verbs used, well over a threefold increase upon poems from 1808 to 1811. Used in chiefly an adjectival role also, they occur twice as frequently in the Calendar as in those first verses, and four times more often than in the later asylum poem ‘Child Harold.’³¹ As much as dialect words or catalogues of details, the use of this part of speech constitutes one of the most notable stylistic features of the poem.

The broader imaginative significance of this emphasis can be suggested by comparing Clare's usage with that of Thomson in The Seasons, where present participles are similarly stressed.³² In his study of the work, Ralph Cohen argues that Thomson's use serves to enhance the ‘active, shifting, transforming emphasis in the language of the poem’;³³ and there is no doubt that Clare achieves a comparable kinetic effect. The active voice inevitably embodied in the present participle (racing, calling, viewing, jilting) creates a clear impression of extending energy, the ‘ing’ morpheme drawing out the more contained sound of the main verb form. There is little doubt, either, that participial construction in the Calendar is often closely associated with the evocation of almost simultaneous perceptions that informs much of the poem. Instead of a series of main verbs held, so to speak, within the confines of the line, the participles seem frequently to overlap each other, in a multiplicity of contemporaneous actions. There is, however, one important respect in which Clare and Thomson achieve different imaginative ends by using this part of speech. For Cohen, Thomson's emphasis is often expressive of uncertainty and incompletion. The participial form highlights the fluctuations in physical nature as seen by the troubled onlooker who cannot penetrate the mysteries of divine ordinance. It reflects, that is to say, feelings of confusion rather than fusion. There are isolated occasions, no doubt, when Clare evokes a similar effect in The Shepherd's Calendar:

The foddering boy forgets his song
& silent goes wi folded arms
& croodling shepherds bend along
Crouching to the whizzing storms
These pictures linger thro the shortning day
& cheer the lone bards mellancholy way
& now & then a solitary boy
Journeying & muttering oer his dreams of joy

(SC, 28, 115)

It is significant that these are the concluding stanzas of two of the monthly sections, for in their context the impact they create is far from conclusive. The participles in the final couplets especially, evoke little sense of security or finality, but rather enhance the impression of unsettled, oblique perceptions. It should be stressed, though, that this effect is rare in the poem. More often, Clare's use of participal forms mirrors the larger stylistic impulse which almost always prevails. Just as the present participle is active in voice, so too the general texture of his language is declarative in emphasis. It operates as it were centripetally, specifying meaning within a relatively circumscribed semantic boundary. The distance between word and referent is narrow, syntax is co-ordinative, signification stable and coherent. Although there are several clear developments between the language of his earlier poems and that of The Shepherd's Calendar, the final effect is similar. With only a few exceptions, word and world are perceived as one.

It is now possible to suggest how the specific poetic features examined in this chapter contribute to the more general portrayal of human and natural worlds in the poem as a whole. What is clear at once is that the realms of nature and human life are, for Clare, closely associated. The natural landscapes he describes are frequently peopled, and no month is without some record of human activity, whether of maiden or ploughboy, harvester or old woman, shepherd or hedger.³⁴ But although such figures play a substantial role, it has often been recognised that they are depicted in a curiously anonymous light. Consistently externalised into action or event or occupation, they take on a generic rather than individual function. A stanza from ‘November’ is typical of this kind of perspective:

The shepherd oft foretells by simple ways
The weathers change that will ere long prevail
He marks the dull ass that grows wild & brays
& sees the old cows gad adown the vale
A summer race & snuff the coming gale
The old dame sees her cat wi fears alarm
Play hurly burly races wi its tale
& while she stops her wheel her hands to warm
She rubs her shooting corns & prophecys a storm

(SC, 119-20),

The fact that both shepherd and old dame look outwards beyond themselves to notice objects in the natural world is symptomatic of a general movement in the poem. The internal realm of individual motivation and desire is almost entirely opaque. Character, as Barrell points out,³⁵ is essentially a function of what people do rather than of what they are.

The reasons presented in the past for Clare's dispassionate and even distanced view of human affairs have varied, in both emphasis and cogency. His several remarks about the ignorance and philistinism of his fellow villagers,³⁶ together with his later confession that ‘I always lived to myself’ (Letters, 301), have suggested to some an anti-social attitude bordering on misanthropy:

Nature is all very fine but human nature is finer, as Keats very rightly realised. The more Clare took refuge in the country the more he was forced into a position of isolation from society—the distant disgruntled spectator. When every prospect pleases and only Man is vile, what other home is there for the poet if not in Bedlam?³⁷

There is, though, more of wayward passion than persuasiveness in this kind of argument, not least because it proposes a necessary, if not inevitable link between putative misanthropy and actual madness. Nor, either, is it finally possible to interpret the presentation of human life in the poem as the result of a kind of psychological innocence on Clare's part, an inability to depict the world of motivation and inner impulse. The four village tales in the 1827 volume, like the title poem of the earlier Village Minstrel, contain some elements of psychological understanding, albeit of a fairly rudimentary sort. More convincingly, a poem like ‘The Robber’, composed during the same period as The Shepherd's Calendar, reveals chiefly through a dramatic monologue form an inner world that, in several respects, anticipates Browning or the Tennyson of Maud. A thief, having killed a farmer during a poaching expedition, meditates upon the murder:

The shot was fired—dead silence paused—then groans
That would have fretted human hearts to stones
& that last groan of uttermost despair
I hear it now—or did I stir the chair …
Look now tis there upon that dismal cloud
A jiant—no a monster sails—look there
He ll swallow up the moon stars all—beware
He hears the muttering guns well never fear
Tis but a Hare the crime is not severe
There now tis changed

(PJC, [The Poems of John Clare, ed. J. W. Tibble, 2 vols. (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1935)], I, 409-10)

Although ‘The Robber’ is not especially remarkable verse, lines like these, evoking the urgent shifts of the mind between memory and actuality, realisation of guilt and spurious self-justification, suggest that Clare might with some success have explored the inner life of the villagers in The Shepherd's Calendar. That he did not do so indicates, not misanthropy or inability, but a different imaginative strategy.

In The Idea of Landscape,³⁸ John Barrell advances what is essentially a socio-economic interpretation of Clare's attitude to the village inhabitants in the poem. The very notion of ‘character’ in the historical development of literature, he argues, is basically a postfeudal one, and is closely related to the ascendancy of a bourgeois social philosophy over an aristocratic framework of social organisation. In so far, however, as Clare still accepts the assumptions about character and society implicit in that earlier aristocratic structure, in so far as he rejects the individualistic values of agrarian capitalism, he necessarily sees human personality not in terms of a veiled and complex interior life, but in terms of external actions and deeds. There is, however, a further aspect of this more ‘primitive’ approach to personality that is more specifically literary in impulse. In the previous chapter, it was seen that one of the shaping forces upon his earliest poetry was the ballad form; and the view of human affairs presented in the genre is echoed throughout The Shepherd's Calendar. Just as the ballads he heard during his boyhood do not seek to define human beings in any individuality, so too the poem reflects an impersonalised approach to characterisation. The villagers are seen, not as unique personalities with distinctive inner lives, but as an aggregation of older, collective attitudes, of the shared experience of wooing and harvesting, ploughing and merrymaking, that forms the centre of a traditional knowledge. They are what they participate in; and what they participate in are the embedded patterns of age-old human response.

This sense of an older, more objective view of human personality is mirrored in Clare's presentation of nature; and indeed there could be few better illustrations of how The Shepherd's Calendar sounds with a new authority than the contrast it affords in this respect with the earliest verse. In a number of poems written before 1821, a characteristic strategy is to present the natural world as analogy and exemplification. The lark singing in winter, for instance, is seen as enduring the same wretchedness as himself: ‘Thy case wi mine I sympathize it/With many a sigh’ (PJC, I, 26). The robin's song, similarly, is ‘like my sigh / [which] warbles not on happiness to come’ (PJC, I, 284). Falling leaves suggest, inevitably, man's fate:

the naked woods let me attend
Reflecting their decline
Where pattering leaves confes their fall
Reminding me of mine
for every leaf that meets the breeze
may useful lessons give
The falling leaves & fading trees
will teach us how to live(39)

Just as the snail leaves its shell,

So pass we from the worlds affairs
& careless vanish from its cares
So leave wi silent long farewell
Vain life—as left the snail his shell

(PJC, I, 196)

There is, I imagine, no need to cite further examples of this kind of comparison, for what is at once apparent is the contrivance of the rehearsed gesture. The quotations above imitate a procedure to be found in any number of eighteenth-century meditative-descriptive poems, where a relationship between material world and inner feeling is insisted upon, however tenuous and inorganic that relationship turns out to be.⁴⁰ In The Shepherd's Calendar, though, Clare's response is far less mechanical; and nature is rarely presented as a convenient source for such analogies. As I proposed at the beginning of this chapter, the poem effects a radical break from the conventional pieties of the paysage moralisé; and although there are instances where he places a moral construction upon the natural scene (in the attacks upon enclosure, for example, or the destruction of old village customs), the lessons drawn are now very much less forced. A body of known and observed experience shapes their articulation. The weakening of the impulse towards analogy is also shown, as was noted earlier, in the absence of any mythological or metaphysical frame of reference to the poem. His often-quoted criticism of Keats's poetry (‘behind every rose bush he looks for a Venus & under every laurel a thrumming Appollo’, Prose, 223) testifies to his distrust of the intrusions of myth into natural description. Similarly, although scenes like the ‘whizzing storms’ of ‘February’ or the mists of ‘November’ intimate a greater uncertainty of perception, they lead to no revelation of parallel planes of existence, either in or beyond the material world.

This disinclination to abstract the details of nature contributes greatly to the cogency of its realisation in the poem. He recognises, with a countryman's unsentimental stoicism, that the natural world is autonomous, finally independent of human concerns. It is seen as an impersonal otherness, disengaged from those mental and emotional constructions through which man tries to understand its purpose. It expresses, moreover, basic paradoxes. It is both active and passive, both creative and destructive. Threatened and despoiled by human greed, it too threatens human survival in the biting cold and storms of the winter months. It operates as a unity, all the elements of animal and plant life obeying the patterns of seasonal change; yet it also contains basic dissonances, in which the fearful shriek of the badger betokens death by ‘the waking fox’, or in which the solitary crane in ‘March’ resists the renewal of spring. These dualities, reiterated throughout the poem, point towards a conception of nature as a pure neutrality, operating not so much randomly as with total dispassionateness. A-social, a-moral, and a-spiritual, its very physicality contains its own complete self-justification.

What is notable about this portrayal of nature as object is that such a mode of awareness is not simply expressed as the poem unfolds, but is frequently enacted in the texture of the verse. The stylistic pressure towards equalisation, where different objects advance with similar weight and significance into an authoritative foreground, often creates the sensation that the natural details themselves shape the act of perceiving. The hypotaxis by which the self might fashion the landscapes it sees, according some objects a lesser function, others a more prominent role, is subordinated to a parataxis which democratically crowds ever more details into the foreground of attention. The perceiver, in other words, stands in a kind of rigorous neutrality, endorsing before all else the inviolable reality of the physical object.

The sustained attention Clare pays to the reality located in external objects, it is worth emphasising, informs even those moments when his perception seems less secure, and when natural details are not so equalised in significance. The uncertainties of sight in ‘July’ and ‘November’, for example, give no impression of his now imposing himself upon the landscape, creating a syntax to mirror his own internal feelings. The ‘croodling shepherd’ and ‘whizzing storms’ of ‘February’, similarly, provide no objective correlative to an inner world.⁴¹ Even when natural processes seem to work against each other, the poet's self remains dispassionate, as it watches the objects of nature fulfilling their function in a pure presence. It is in this realisation that the fundamental knowledge of the poem resides.

At the beginning of this chapter, I argued that The Shepherd's Calendar is Clare's first substantial work in which a distinctive cogency of voice is to be heard. It is, in many respects, a transitional poem, marking the passage between his poetic apprenticeship and maturity. In its structural weaknesses, it recalls the uncertainties of design that sometimes characterise his earliest work; and not even the pattern of month-by-month description can allay the repetitiousness and mere listing of details that sometimes occur.⁴² But its imaginative strength rests in its portrayal of what Clare himself calls ‘a real world’ (SC, 21). That reality, as the burden of this chapter has indicated, is predominantly coherent; but he does not indulge in the painless conclusion that such coherence is axiomatic, or that it is always consonant with human ideals and aspirations. There is no false rhetoric, no easy assumption that natural and human worlds are always one. Underpinning the whole work, indeed, is the force of a centuries-old tradition of rural understanding. It is a knowledge that is both tough and dispassionate, both unsentimental and pervasively sane.

Notes

1. British Library, Egerton MS 2245, fol. 25, 21 January 1820.

2. Ibid., MS 2246, fol. 228, 1 August 1823.

3. For Clare's reactions to his first reading of The Seasons, see Sketches, 57-9. He refers to Thomson frequently in his prose writings (see Prose, 19, 39-40, 78, 121-2, 175, 182) and occasionally also in his poems (PJC, I, 366; JCSP [John Clare: Selected Poems, ed. J. W. and Anne Tibble (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1965)], 136). [John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972)], provides the fullest and most illuminating treatment of the poetic relationship between Thomson and Clare.

4. For an examination of this theme, see Ralph Cohen, ‘Thomson's Poetry of Space and Time’, in Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660-1800, ed. Howard Anderson and John S. Shea (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967) pp. 176-92.

5. For a detailed examination of these and similar poems, see Dwight L. Durling, Georgic Tradition in English Poetry (1935; repr. New York: Kennikat Press, 1964); and [Mark Storey, The Poetry of John Clare (London: Macmillan, 1974)], pp. 70-84.

6. Clare's dialect has been a source of debate from the first appearance of Poems Descriptive in 1820, though the subject has often generated more critical heat than light. Many contemporary reviewers attacked his use of ‘provincialisms’, but twentieth-century critics have valued them more highly. The most valuable treatment of this aspect of his language is Barbara Strang, ‘John Clare's Language’, in RM [The Rural Muse, Poems by John Clare, ed. R. K. R. Thornton (Mid-Northunberland Arts Group and Carcanet Press, 1982)], pp. 159-73. For other discussions see Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield, ‘John Taylor's Editing of Clare's The Shepherd's Calendar’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 14 (November 1963) 359-69; G. Thomas Tanselle, ‘Two Words in John Clare's “Winter”’, Word Study, 40 (October 1964) 5-6; my own A Publisher and his Circle [: The Life and Work of John Taylor, Keats's Publisher (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972)], pp. 86-128; Stephen Wade, ‘John Clare's Use of Dialect’, Contemporary Review, 223 (August 1973) 81-4.

7. Cited in R. A. Forsyth, ‘The Conserving Myth of William Barnes’, in Romantic Mythologies, ed. Ian Fletcher (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967) p. 147.

8. See especially Letters, 203-4, 238-40. During his visits to London, Clare met a number of artists, including Hilton, Rippingille, Etty and Lawrence, as well as De Wint; and during one visit he recalled going to the Royal Academy ‘almost every day’ (Prose, 82). For the most extensive treatment of the relationship between painting and his poetry, see [Timothy Brownlow, John Clare and Picturesque Landscape (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983)], pp. 97-115. Affinities between his work and the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Vincent Van Gogh are discussed in, respectively, Salman Dawood Al-Wasiti, ‘The Poetry of John Clare: A Critical Study’ (Leicester University Ph.D., 1976) pp. 164-9; and Barbara Lupini, ‘“An Open and Simple Eye”: The Influence of Landscape in the Work of John Clare and Vincent Van Gogh’, English, 23 (Summer 1974) 58-62.

9. [Greg Crossan, A Relish for Eternity: The Process of Divinization in the Poetry of John Clare (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1976)], pp. 114-15, doubts the genuineness of the contrast, citing the possible influence of Bloomfield on Clare's attitude (cf. ‘No Alpine wonders thunder through my verse’, The Farmer's Boy [1800], I, 8), and also Clare's apparently conflicting claim that joy can be found in ‘the thunder melting clouds / The snow capt mountain & the rolling sea’. These lines, however, are not contemporaneous with the sonnet to De Wint, but occur in a much later asylum poem (JCSP, 314), when his response to the sublimity of mountains and heights had indeed changed. The possible source in Bloomfield, moreover, does not necessarily lessen the genuineness of the pictorial contrast.

10. The parentheses around the words ‘not bounds’ occur thus in the manuscripts, but the second bracket may be misplaced. The sentence reads more plausibly: ‘we fancy we might pursue the landscape beyond those mysterys (not bounds assigned it) so as we can in the fields—’

11. See Barrell, The Idea of Landscape, p. 145; Brownlow, John Clare and Picturesque Landscape, p. 102.

12. Part of this description reveals the clear influence of the opening to Keats's Hyperion: ‘No stir of air was there, / Not so much life as on a summer's day / Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass’ (I, 7-9). In a letter to Hessey of July 1820, Clare quotes these lines, which he describes as ‘striking’ (Letters, 56-7).

13. The Seasons, ed. Sambrook [(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981)], p. 125.

14. The Subtler Language (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959) p. 183.

15. Joanna Rapf, ‘“The Constellation of the Plough”; the Peasant Poets, John Clare and his “Circle”: A Study of Their Relationship to Some of the Major Romantic Writers’ (Brown University Ph.D., 1973) p. 327.

16. Language and the Poet: Verbal Artistry in Frost, Stevens, and Moore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979) p. 23.

17. The passages from The Shepherd's Calendar comprise 2500 words from ‘October’ (entire section), ‘February’ (entire section) and ‘May’ (11. 1-94). Those from The Seasons (1746 version) comprise 2500 words from ‘Spring’ (11. 524-52, 569-648), ‘Summer’ (11. 432-537), ‘Autumn’ (11. 1080-1100), ‘Winter’ (11. 118-201, 722-46). The distinctiveness of such monosyllabic emphasis, it is worth pointing out, becomes even more apparent when other of Clare's poems are placed beside The Seasons (for abbreviations, see below):

    Percent of monosyllabic words in total vocabulary

    1809                                                                                76
    SC                                                                                74
    1832                                                                                78
    CH                                                                                80
    Seasons                                                  69

    The figures above are derived from a statistical analysis of samples from Clare's poetry, and since several subsequent notes refer to the samples, it is appropriate to give the most important details here. The analysis has been based upon a total sample of 10,000 words, drawn from four different stages of his career:

    1809 = 2500 words from poems which can be ascribed either definitely to that year or at least to the period 1808-13.

    SC = 2500 words drawn from the sections noted above in The Shepherd's Calendar, circa 1832-6.

    1832 = 2500 words drawn from ‘Remembrances’, ‘The Flitting’ and ‘Decay’, 1832.

    CH = 2500 words drawn from ‘Child Harold,’ 1841.

    As subsequent notes show, these samples have been investigated from several perspectives: the recurrence of ‘key words’, the use of parts of speech, the proportioning between Old English/Germanic derivatives and Latinate/Romance derivatives, and so forth. Full details of the procedures adopted, as well as a discussion of the dangers and benefits of the numerical analysis of literary texts, are provided in the earlier version of this study, ‘“A Real World & Doubting Mind”: A Critical Study of the Poetry of John Clare’, University of Sussex, 1979, pp. 314-28. Since that time, I have found the work of Borroff (see n. 16 above) and Strang (see n. 6 above) particularly helpful.

18. Sambrook (ed.), p. 264. There are substantial differences between the earliest version of ‘Winter’, from which I quote, and the later revisions made by Thomson. The emphasis upon Romance and Latinate derivatives, however, is common to all versions.

19. See Ralph Cohen, The Unfolding of ‘The Seasons’ (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970) pp. 33, 47, 329.

20. As Borroff argues, however, the notion that subject matter inevitably compels the use of certain derivatives is treacherous, since etymologically ‘any subject can be treated in English … in more than one kind of language’ (p. 27).

21. The sections comprise 500 words from ‘Summer’ (1746), 11. 432-557, and 500 words from The Prelude (1850), I, 301-430.

22. Cited in Life (1972 ed.) p. 112.

23. Line references are, respectively, 176-82; 193-200; 142-8. For several details in my interpretation of this cataloguing procedure, I am indebted to Karl Kroeber, Romantic Landscape Vision: Constable and Wordsworth (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975) pp. 80-3. As Kroeber notes, the subject of medieval and Renaissance allegoric landscapes and gardenscapes is an enormously complicated one; and I am well aware that to group the lists of Chaucer, Spenser and Milton together in this way is to ignore numerous differences of form and context in the three poems. However, I seek here simply to establish a basic historical contrast between earlier catalogues of natural details and Clare's own inventories.

24. Sambrook (ed.) p. 28.

25. Poetical Works, p. 140.

26. The Subtler Language, pp. 179-80.

27. C. V. Fletcher's claim (‘The Poetry of John Clare, with particular reference to poems written between 1837 and 1864’ [Nottingham University M. Phil., 1973]) that Clare's concept of nature is ‘firmly in the tradition of “the great chain” of Pope's (and Shakespeare's) metaphysics’ (p. 177) seems to me misplaced. Nowhere in The Shepherd's Calendar, and rarely elsewhere, are there explicit or implicit references to such a tradition. When they occur, as in ‘On a Lost Greyhound’, they have the clear ring of applied rather than felt knowledge. …

28. Lives of the Poets: a selection, ed. J. P. Hardy (London: Oxford University Press, 1971) pp. 286, 325.

29. The major terms or ‘key words’ comprise referential or non-functional words used seven or more times in each 2500-word sample. The exact figures for the words cited are:

    sweet, 9	sun, 14
    vain, 9	tree, 10
    dear, 7	wood, 10
    little, 7	door, 9
    be, 23	hedge, 9
    view, 8
    scene, 8
    life, 7

    See also n. 17 above. …

30. Another notable example of participial emphasis, too long to be quoted here, occurs in the early part of ‘October’ (SC, 112). Within the 28 lines from ‘The geese flock gabbling’ to ‘Brushing the woods’, 22 present participles occur.

31. The exact figures are:

    	Present participles used adjectivally as ٪ of all adjectives	Present participles used as verbs as ٪ of all verbs
    1809	10	7
    SC	19	24
    1832	7	6
    CH	5	2

32. In ‘Milton's Participial Style’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA), 83 (1968) 1386-99, Seymour Chatman argues that Thomson's frequent use of the present participle constitutes ‘a most pronounced mannerism’. From the figures Chatman provides, however, there is some evidence to suggest that Clare uses the participle more than twice as often as Thomson.

33. The Unfolding of ‘The Seasons’, p. 199.

34. Crossan (A Relish for Eternity, pp. 120-1) notes, more generally, that of all Clare's poems ‘that may loosely be called “nature poems” … approximately 260 include human figures, compared with some 180 unpeopled poems’. He has counted over eighty different occupations portrayed in the published works.

35. The Idea of Landscape, p. 172. This concept of ‘character’ is not unique to The Shepherd's Calendar. It persists in the twenty or so sonnets about village people that Clare wrote between 1835 and 1837 (see PJC, II, 344-55).

36. See especially Letters, 132; Sketches, 67.

37. W. K. Richmond, repr. in [Clare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Mark Storey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973)], p. 403.

38. Barrell, pp. 172-3.

39. Quoted in A. J. V. Chapple, ‘Some Unpublished Poetical Manuscripts of John Clare’, Yale University Library Gazette, 31 (July 1956) p. 44.

40. See Earl Wasserman, ‘The English Romantics: The Grounds of Knowledge’, Studies in Romanticism, 4 (1964) 20. cf. Coleridge's complaint about poetry in which ‘there reigns … such a perpetual trick of moralizing every thing … never to see or describe any interesting appearance in nature, without connecting it by dim analogies with the moral world proves faintness of Impression.’ (Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. [London: Oxford University Press, 1956-71], II, 864).

41. For an almost entirely opposite view, see Ronald W. Link, ‘Towards the Abyss: Modern Elements in the Poetry of John Clare’ (Miami University Ph.D., 1976). Link suggests that the ‘strategic placement’ of the shepherd at the end of ‘February’ ‘leads to the conclusion that Clare projected much of himself into his portrait … Identifying the shepherd with Clare explains his growing pessimism and his turn inward’ (p. 168). It seems to me, though, that such a view does less than justice to the rigorous neutrality of Clare's portrayal, for the reasons I give above.

42. The structure of month-by-month description, indeed, sometimes works to Clare's disadvantage, since there are obvious problems in isolating natural features that are characteristic of one month only. Mark Minor (‘The Poet in his Joy: A Critical Study of John Clare's Development’ [Ohio State University Ph.D., 1970]) comments upon the ‘lack of a clear distinction between [the] summer months’ (p. 156). But for a different view, see Brownlow, John Clare and Picturesque Landscape: ‘Clare knew that the English year has an almost infinite variety of moods, and that every week has a different flavour, let alone every month’ (p. 69). The problem, though, is whether that knowledge is translated into imaginative realisation in the poem, and here I tend to agree more with Minor's argument.