Then he the tennant of the hall & Cot
The princely palace too hath been his home
& Gipsey's camp where friends would know him not
In midst of wealth a beggar still to roam
Parted from one whose heart was once his home

(“Child Harold”, Later Poems, 1, p. 62)

John Clare's “Child Harold” is a poem of many voices. One of the original manuscript versions (Northampton MS 6) is physically divided into a series of discrete stanza-song units by a system of line-divisions, and the above quotation indicates just some of the identities that the personal pronoun assumes in its picaresque wanderings after “the one whose heart was once his home.”¹ The present article is an attempt to elucidate this contention by reading the poem against Bakhtin's notion of the polyphonic text as developed in his Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. This will include reference to the following aspects of the text: (1) as a site of interaction between a number of independent voices and its subsequent resistance to closure; (2) its tendency towards simultaneity and co-existence rather than sequence and development; (3) its use of doubly-voiced speech (in particular, stylisation).² The reading also depends substantially on the Bakhtinian theories of intonation as interpreted by various commentators, and I shall be especially concerned with the class registers represented by the different voices.

The reader unfamiliar with Clare criticism will doubtless find it hard to believe that such a modest proposal represents a radical challenge to previous “interpretations” of Clare's asylum poem. Largely on account of repeated efforts to establish his status as a respected Romantic poet, few scholars have appeared willing to submit Clare's writings to the same theoretical speculations as his more illustrious contemporaries. To actively “deconstruct” his work, or (as in this case) to question the existence of an authentic authorial voice that can be identified as the “essential” John Clare, would be deemed suicidal. Yet it is almost certainly this anxious inhibition, more than anything else, that has maintained Clare's position as a “minor poet”.

“Child Harold” is, indeed, a text that has suffered badly at the hands of traditional literary criticism. Most existing readings have deemed the poem a failure on account of the fact that it shows neither “development” nor “resolution”: the two major pre-requisites of a long poem.³ The very profundity of its indeterminacy has invited its readers to conclude that, while showing potential, it was nevertheless a victim of its author's mental instability, his inability to finish what he had begun. Admittedly the temptations to read the poem in biographical terms are great: the MS 8 version of the poem, for example, is physically interwoven with Clare's autobiographical account of his “Journey Out of Essex”.⁴ It seems curious, nevertheless, that bearing in mind the obvious instability of Clare's identity at this time (most commentators remark on the existence of his “delusions”), no-one has thought that the “I” of the poem might be similarly unstable. I would suggest that for the twentieth-century reader there are several reasons why it should seem preferable to read “Child Harold” as a text of not one, but many, voices. First there is the fact that Clare's writing shows a long history of poetic surrogacy; Clare was a prodigious imitator from his earliest years, and a great deal of his work bears very obvious inter-textual traces of other authors.⁵ Secondly, there is the whole weight of recent critical theory which, since Barthes's “Death of the Author,” has long resisted the easy association of the author and the personal pronoun. Meanwhile, if we turn specifically to Bakhtin, we are reminded that his conception of the polyphonic text depended absolutely on the rejection of any transcendent ego: true dialogue between voices is characterized by the fact that the author's voice is no way superior to that of his or her characters.⁶ Likewise, the free interplay between the different voices in “Child Harold” depends upon the fact that none may be thought identifiable with the author per se; none represents an “essential” John Clare. This returns us to the final reason for recognizing the existence of a number of different personal pronouns within the poem, and that is its formal organisation into a number of discrete sections (see note 1). The following reading will therefore demonstrate how the more substantial “units” of stanzas and songs correspond, on an intonational level, with a number of different narrative personae or voices. Yet this is not to propose that every stanza-song unit is commensurate with a single voice; on the contrary, a number of units establish an internal dialogue between two or more voices. Indeed, it is the extension of this dialogic activity from the macrocosmic organisation of the text, through to the interaction between voices, and extending even to the level of the sentence and the individual word, that constitutes the text's claim to full polyphonic status. To quote Bakhtin:

Dialogic relationships are possible not only among whole (relatively whole) utterances; a dialogic approach is possible toward any signifying part of an utterance, even toward an individual word, if that word is perceived not as the impersonal word of language but as a sign of someone else's semantic position, as the representative of another person's utterance; that is, if we hear in it someone else's voice. Thus dialogic relationships can permeate inside the utterance, even inside the individual word, as long as two voices collide within it dialogically. (Problems, pp. 184-5)

The following discussion focuses on six of the most readily characterized voices (or narratorial subject-positions) that constitute “Child Harold.” Three of these are analysed with respect to single stanza-song units, but it should be noted that the section on the two voices represented by the text's use of the traditional ballad genre is necessarily wider ranging, as is the section on biblical discourse. The article ends with an assessment of to what extent the interaction of these voices may be seen to profile Bakhtin's characterization of the “polyphonic text” as outlined above.

By far the most readily identifiable of the voices to be found in “Child Harold” is the “Byronic.”⁷ It is also the most pervasive, recurring in a number of individual songs and stanzas as well as in the longer sequences. There are, in addition, several single lines in the poem which directly, or indirectly, echo Byron's texts.⁸ Its most sustained presentation, however, is in the stanza-song unit beginning ‘My Life hath been one love—no blot it out’ (Later Poems, 1, p. 45) which consists of a sequence of eight stanzas and one song. Here the narrator presents himself as a bold lover or rake; a man who has had many loves, yet remained faithful to none:

I have had many loves—& seek no more—
These solitudes my last delights shall be
The leaf-hid forest—& the lonely shore
Seem to my mind like beings that are free
Yet would I had some eye to smile on me
Some heart where I could make a happy home in
Sweet Susan that was wont my love to be
& Bessey of the glen—for I’ve been roaming
With both at morn & noon & dusky gloaming

(Later Poems, 1, p. 47)

The key to the tone of this whole sequence is one of contempt and defiance: contempt for life, religion and death; defiance against authority, exile, and pain. In a tirade against “Madhouses Prisons Wh-re shops” and other corrupt institutions, the speaker assumes an arrogant superiority over both his listener and what Don Bialostosky has identified as “the object of the utterance.”⁹ According to Bakhtinian principles, it is, indeed, the power-relationship between the speaker and his/her interlocutors that essentially establishes the tone of an address, and here he asserts an unqualified domination over them. The authority is, moreover, a register of class. This is not a humble peasant-poet that speaks, but an aristocratic libertine who has the wealth and status that enable him to renounce the world—its deceits and hypocrisies—with contempt. Syntactically, as well as in their intonational stance, these stanzas bear an obvious debt to Byron, reproducing Don Juan's use of half and hanging lines, together with its ironic rhymes. In terms of Bakhtin's categories of doubly-voiced speech, this is very obviously stylisation, with the text retaining “the general intention of the original” while, at the same time, “casting a slight shadow of objectification over it” (see Note 2). And if, syntactically, these stanzas are a stylisation of Don Juan, the intonation itself can be seen to be imported directly from Childe Harold, whose narrator frequently assumes a voice of proud contempt towards a corrupt or fickle world.¹⁰ A specific analogy can be drawn between Childe Harold's response to a thunderstorm, and that annexed by Clare's speaker in the song that ends the unit. As will be seen from the following extracts, both protagonists seek divine supremacy over their “object of utterance”, the mortal world, through their communion with it:

Could I embody and embosom now
That which is most within me,—could I wreak
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or
                                                                                weak …
And that one word were Lightning …

(Childe Harold, Canto III, stanza xcvii)

Roll on ye wrath of thunders—peal on peal
Till worlds are ruins & myself alone
Melt heart & soul cased in obdurate steel
Till I can feel that nature is my throne

(“Child Harold”, Later Poems, 1, p. 48)¹¹

The persona of this defiant and ironic lover reappears throughout the poem on occasions too numerous to mention here.¹² The ‘Byronic’ voice is always immediately and obviously apparent because it repeats a specific power-relationship vis-à-vis its interlocutors, and because it is a blatant stylisation of many of Byron's own texts. It is important to realise, however, that while the Byronic voices represent a dominant discourse-type (aristocratic, educated, ruling-class), they are not themselves dominant within the text's overall polyphonic structure. For although these particular speakers assert the confidence of power, it is a power that can be swiftly undermined when heard in dialogue with a discourse of powerlessness. The cavalier defiance of a stanza like ‘Cares gather round’ (Later Poems, 1, p. 48) which ends the sequence we have recently been looking at, or a song like ‘The sun has gone down’ (Later Poems, 1, p. 43), is effectively sobered when read in juxtaposition to the pathetic ‘Ive wandered many a weary mile’ (Later Poems, 1, p. 49): and it is to such songs, representing the most powerless of the voices in the poem, that we now turn.

It is, of course, no coincidence the most vulnerable subject-positions are to be found in the songs. The Spenserian stanza is part of an elevated literary tradition, and its mastery indicates access to the education of the ruling classes. The song and ballad, by contrast, were the property of “the People” and their inclusion in Clare's oeuvre has always been regarded as appropriate for a peasant poet. Raymond Williams, for example, laments the fact that Clare, although well-placed to contribute to the oral tradition which he had inherited, was turned away from what should have been his “natural” idiom by a literary market moving in the opposite direction.¹³ Whatever one feels about this (and it is part of the purpose of this article to challenge the necessity of finding for Clare an authentic voice), “Child Harold” offers plenty of evidence that Clare never did forsake the popular genres. The example I have chosen to illustrate the way in which the stylistic simplicity and naïveté of such songs has been used to reinforce the pathos of the speaker is ‘I think of thee at early day’ (Later Poems, 1, p. 72). Here the vulnerability of the speaker's position may be seen to owe partly to his interrogative stance. Whereas the Byronic hero achieves his authority by stating his feelings and opinions (even if they are, in themselves, negative), here the speaker reveals his uncertainty by phrasing his concerns as questions:

I think of thee at early day
& wonder where my love can be
& when the evening shadows grey
O how I think of thee
I think of thee at dewy morn
& at the sunny noon
& walks with thee—now left forlorn
Beneath the silent moon
I think of thee I think of all
How blest we both have been
The sun looks pale upon the wall
& autumn shuts the scene
I can’t expect to meet thee now
The winter floods begin
The winter sighs through the open bough
Sad as my heart within

(Later Poems, 1, p. 72)

The extreme simplicity of the verse form here (the song is written in regular abab quatrains) combines with the impotence of the statement (he is able to do no more than “think of her”), to conjure up a speaker whose experience and expectations are likewise severely limited. In intonational terms, the speaker debases himself both before his subject of address and his object of utterance (in this case the very question of whether he will ever see her again). For although he addresses himself directly to “Mary,” his veneration is tentative and half-hearted. It is the voice of one who knows his laments will go unheeded and unheard; it begs for sympathy, but at the same time acknowledges that it will receive none. It is an expression of admiration, mixed with an admission of helplessness and shame. It is a voice that, in short, is in “hidden polemic” with a potential rebuff (see Note 2). Meanwhile, as one of the most pathetic voices in “Child Harold,” the wider dialogic effect of “I think of thee at early day” is made specific by its formal combination with another of the “Byronic” stanzas, “Abscence [sic] in love is worse than any fate” (Later Poems, 1, p. 71). Thematically united (both deal with the problem of absence), the pathos of the song is bizarrely juxtaposed to cynical conclusions of the stanza. While the latter views its “object of utterance” with contempt and disgust, the song, as we have seen, admits a helpless despair in the face of something it cannot even name. Whereas the power of the speaker in the stanza allows him to be critical of “Abscence” as an abstract concept, the powerlessness of the speaker in the song makes him a victim of its actuality.

Yet despite the generic suitability of the ballad form to the articulation of a victimized and socially inferior subject-position, it does not follow that it should always be put to this purpose. There are, indeed, in “Child Harold,” a number of other songs and ballads which engage with the oral folk tradition to produce relatively powerful registers of voice: these constitute the third of the voice-types to be discussed here, to which I now proceed.

In Bakhtinian terms, the ballads which come closest to an “unconditional imitation” of the folk genre are those whose speakers and addressees are anonymous and unspecified. One example of this is “Her cheeks are like roses” (Later Poems, 1, p. 68) which is built on clichés (“I will love her as long / As the brooks they shall flow”), giving its vows the authority of an ancient tradition. Whereas the previous song bespoke the fear and insecurity of the alienated ego, this, as a representative of an ‘immortal’ oral tradition is supremely confident:

Ere the flowers of the spring
Deck the meadow & plain
If theres truth in her bosom
I shall see her again
I will love her as long
As the brooks they shall flow
For Mary is mine
Whereso ever I go

(Later Poems, 1, p. 68)

For although the song includes a last verse which identifies the subject of the avowal as “Mary”, she remains, like the speaker, essentially archetypal: a simple vehicle of sentiment on which to hang a conventional declaration of love.

The dialogic significance of these songs in “Child Harold” is considerable, both within their individual units and within the poem as a whole. “Here's a health unto thee,” for example, comes at the end of a six-stanza unit whose internal homogeneity it severely disrupts (see Later Poems, 1, pp. 65-7). This sequence (to be discussed below), which begins with the stanza “Sweet comes the misty mornings in september,” develops a particularly elegant “meditative” tone of address that does not appear elsewhere in the poem, but which is rudely undermined by the song. This generic shift makes it impossible to entertain a common identity for the speaker of both stanzas and song. Instead, the two set up an incongruous dialogue with one another, with the cheerful lightness of the song effectively undermining the bourgeoise obsession of the stanzas. Here, again, we see the popular tradition challenging the seriousness of high literary discourse, proving that in intonational terms, power can never be simplistically reduced to class.

So far we have considered voices whose social dialects and their attendant power-relations represent extremes within the intonational spectrum. Not surprisingly, the poem yields others whose register is far more complex, with the speaker's tone revealing significant contradictions and paradoxes. This is certainly the case with the long stanza sequence beginning “This twilight seems a veil of gause & mist” (Later Poems, 1, pp. 49-52). On account of its Petrarchan imagery and a certain archaism of expression, I have posited the model for this discourse among the sixteenth and seventeenth-century poets that Clare read and imitated throughout his career. One of the most suggestive cross-references would seem to be with Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, which echoes not only the imagery but also many of the sentiments expressed in these sections of “Child Harold.” Stella, like Mary, is addressed as an object of enduring devotion; a love that is literally as immortal as the stars. Comparable, too, is a pervasive use of paradox and oxymoron, tropes endemic to the sixteenth-century court tradition. Finally, as with the Byronic influence, there are lines in “Child Harold” which would seem to directly plagiarize those found in Sidney's poem.¹⁴ With such obvious sympathies in sentiment, imagery, and phrasing, further similarity at an intonational level is only to be expected, and the eight stanzas comprising the sequence are all united by the same “courtly” deference to both listener and “object of address” that we find in Sidney. I quote the second and third stanzas:

Remind me not of other years or tell
My broken heart of joys they are to meet
While thy own falsehood rings the loudest knell
To one fond heart that aches too cold to beat
Mary how oft with fondness I repeat
That name alone to give my troubles rest
The very sound though bitter seemeth sweet
In my loves home & thy own faithless breast
Truths bonds are broke & every nerve distrest
Life is to me a dream that never wakes
Night finds me on this lengthening road alone
Love is to me a thought that ever aches
A frost bound thought that freezes life to stone
Mary in truth & nature still my own
That warms the winter of my aching breast
Thy name is joy nor will I life bemoan
Midnight when sleep takes charge of natures rest
Finds me awake and friendless—not distrest

(Later Poems, 1, p. 49)

Placed within the context of the sequence as a whole, moreover, it will be seen that the shifting subjects of address to be found in these two stanzas (from an unspecified interlocutor to Mary, and back again) extend to “Nature” in the first, “Sleep” in the fourth, and “England” in the fifth without any significant change in intonation. The same relationship between speaker, listener, and object of address is sustained throughout. This position of dignified subservience, which is in such stark contrast to the bravura of the Byronic sequence (discussed above), is further evidence of the complex dance of intonation and social register that make up the poem. For although the Petrarchan voice, like the Byronic one, is privileged in class-terms, it affects a position of powerlessness vis-à-vis its various interlocutors. And while, in the final two stanzas of the sequence, the speaker becomes newly assertive, defying both listener and circumstance with an aggressive declamation of his love: “For her for one whose very name is yet / My hell or heaven—& will ever be” (Later Poems, 1, p. 50), he remains, unlike his Byronic counterpart, subservient before his “object of utterance”: “To make my soul new bonds which God made free.” Supported by its distinctive sixteenth-century vocabulary and diction, this unit therefore constitutes another identifiable narratorial persona within the poem. It is also interesting to observe that, in this instance, the particular intonational quality of the stanzas is carried through into the song, “O Mary sing thy songs to me.”¹⁵

Yet Bakhtin's polyphonic text is characterised not simply by the articulation of independent voices, but by their relation to one another, and the final significance of the unit we have just considered lies in its positioning immediately after the “Byronic” sequence discussed earlier. This is one of the most distinctive breaks in the poem in intonational terms, comparable, as the critic William Howard has rightly observed, to the transition from a loud, fast, movement in a musical symphony, to a slow, soft, one.¹⁶ Between the “Thunderstorm” poem discussed above and “This twilight seems a veil of gause & mist,” there is a significant shift of power. As we have seen, a proud, disdainful lover is replaced by a humble, reverential one, and the inter-textual reference is no longer to Byron but to Sidney. In a sequential reading of the MS 6 version of the poem, this transition will be heard as one of its key junctures: an interface at which not only the voices, but other polarized features in the poem (such as the imagery) are brought together in dialogic confrontation.

The next group of voices to be considered are those associated with biblical rhetoric. The first rather surprising factor to note here is that, despite the fact that “Child Harold” is embedded in biblical material in its original manuscript sources, the incidence of explicitly biblical discourse in the poem itself is relatively small. While it is true that in MS 8 the physical inter-textualization of material makes a reading of “Child Harold” is unavoidably implicated in the biblical quotations and paraphrases which surround it, the MS 6 version bears few direct allegiances. The most significant exception are the two stanzas, “The lightenings vivid flashes” and “A shock, a moment in the wrath of God” (Later Poems, 1 p. 69). Here the rhetoric of prophecy combines with the imagery of apocalypse in an obvious cross-reference to the paraphrase from Revelations 21 and 22 to which the stanzas are juxtaposed in MS 6.¹⁷ Their significance in intonational terms lies in the fact that they contribute another “powerful” voice to the repertoire of the poem as whole: a speaker whose relation to both his speakers and his “object of utterance” invokes a divine authority, more uncompromising, even, than that of the Byronic Hero:

A shock, a moment, in the wrath of God
Is long as hell's eternity to all
His thunderbolts leave life but as the clod
Cold & inna[ni]mate—their temples fall
Beneath his frown to ashes—the eternal pall
Of wrath sleeps oer the ruins where they fell
& nought of memory can their creeds recall
The sin of Sodom was a moments yell
Fires death bed theirs their first grave the last
                                                                                hell

(Later Poems, 1, p. 69)

In Bakhtinian terms, the relation here between the speaker and the discourse is particularly interesting since the former, while anonymous, assumes the diction and intonation of the God he describes. It will be observed that each statement, made in the present tense, is ennunciated as an incontrovertible fact: a simple repetition of His “Truth.” This may thus be seen as a stylisation of biblical rhetoric, comparable to the previous stylisations of Byron, Sidney, and the ballad tradition. A similar transference of biblical authority is to be heard in the voice of the speaker in the stanza “& he who studies nature's volume through” (Later Poems, 1, p. 43). While not prophetic in the manner of the apocalyptic stanzas, this stanza likewise describes God's omnipotence in the voice of biblical sermonizing. “Thus saith the great & high & lofty one” (Later Poems, 1, p. 53), meanwhile, is an actual paraphrase of Isaiah 57. Incorporated into the sequence beginning “Now melancholly autumn comes anew,” the source for this stanza has apparently gone unnoticed by any of Clare's previous editors and critics. Robinson and Powell note an earlier version in MS D20, but fail to cite the paraphrase which occurs on the last page of MS 8 from which it evidently derives: “Thus Saith the High & lofty One that inhabits eternity whose name is holy ‘I dwell in the high & holy place, with him also that is of contrite & humble Spirit that trembles at my word.’” Unlike the other biblical stanzas, this one does not merely stylise the rhetoric of an omnipotent God, but incorporates direct quotation. In intonational terms, it therefore represents an interesting swing between the humility of the speaker (“Thou high & lofty one—O give to me / Truths low estate”) to the absolute authority of the Father himself. Most significant, however, is the way in which this stanza, based as it is on an external source, reads as in no way incongruous to the sequence into which it is inserted. The preceding and succeeding stanzas, addressed respectively to “Nature” and “Mary”, share a comparable intonational humility; clear evidence that homogeneity of tone is frequently more important than content in determining the aesthetic coherence of the written word. In conclusion it may thus be seen that the contribution of the scriptural voice to “Child Harold”'s overall polyphonic structure, while undoubtedly significant, is less wide-ranging than earlier commentators such as Mark Minor have implied.¹⁸ The stanzas cited here are the only ones which are specifically identifiable as scriptural in origin, to which may be added the “Thunderstorm” song discussed above. Together they constitute the deep bass of the poem's intonational spectrum: the discourse of absolute (because divine) power and authority; the polarized opposite of the powerless peasant exile.

The final voice I wish to deal with in this reading of “Child Harold”’s polyphonic composition cannot be ascribed to a single literary source. It belongs to the unit beginning “Sweet come the misty morning in september” and ends with the song “Heres a health unto thee bonny lassie O” (Later Poems, 1, pp. 65-7), discussed above. Consisting of six stanzas, this is one of the most unified sequences in the whole poem, both in terms of its intonational continuity and its imagery, which focuses on the cumulative metaphor of the “village bells.” The mood of the passage is reflective, and the nearest it comes to a literary model is probably the eighteenth-century meditation poem and its Romantic variant in texts like Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey:

Sweet comes the misty mornings in september
Among the dewy paths how sweet to stray
Greensward or stubbles as I well remember
I once have done—the mist curls thick & grey
As cottage smoke—like net work on the sprey
Of seeded grass the cobweb draperies run
Beaded with pearls of dew at early day
& oer the pleachy stubbles peeps the sun
the lamp of day when that of night is done
What mellowness these harvest days unfold
In the strong glance of the midday sun
The homesteads very grass seems changed to gold
The light in golden shadows seems to run
& tinges every spray it rests upon
With that rich harvest hue of sunny joy
Natures lifes Sweet companion cheers alone—
The hare starts up before the shepherd boy
& partridge coveys wir on russet wings of joy

(Later Poems, 1, p. 65)

It will be seen from the first two stanzas that the position of the speaker vis-à-vis his interlocutors is one of equanimity. This speaker venerates Nature, not from a position of subservience but as an intimate equal. In terms of a power relationship, this means that the voice in this unit exhibits neither the authority of the Byronic or biblical discourses, nor the (relative) humility of the Petrarchan passages. In its first five stanzas, the sequence registers a dialogue of equality between speaker, listener and “object of utterance.” It is a voice which is in consensus with its “future answer word”; where the speaker is in harmony with the world. Here is the fifth stanza:

Sweet solitude thou partner of my life
Thou balm of hope & every pressing care
Thou soothing silence oer the noise of strife
These meadow flats & trees—the Autumn air
Mellows my heart to harmony—I bear
Lifes burthen happily—these fenny dells
Seem Eden in this sabbath rest from care
My heart with loves first early memory swells
To hear the music of those village bells

(Later Poems, 1, p. 66)

This illusion of a reciprocal relationship based on equality, is, however, temporary. Although the reader may perceive in these first five stanzas a final escape from the power-struggle inherent in the other voices, and although s/he may read the absence of any recognisable stylisation as commensurate with an independent voice (be it Clare's own or that of an implied author), the final stanza delivers a sting that reveals the earlier equanimity to be a foil to a hidden obsession:

For in that hamlet lives my rising sun
Whose beams hath cheered me all my lorn life long
My heart to nature there was early won
For she was natures self—& still my song
Is her through sun & shade through right & wrong
On her my memory forever dwells
The flower of Eden—evergreen of song
Truth in my heart the same love story tells
—I love the music of those village bells

(Later Poems, 1, p. 67)

It will now be seen that the autumn landscape and ‘village bells’ addressed with such apparent innocence in the preceding stanzas are, in fact, metaphors for the beloved: “For she was natures self” [my italics]. This information causes the reader to redouble and re-assess both the semantic and the intonational impact of the sequence. Since we now know that nature and bells are not simply objects to which the speaker relates in democratic dialogue, but, instead, symbols for an object of reverence (Mary), our whole register of the power-relationship necessarily changes. The speaker is no longer equal with his object of utterance, but once again its subject and devotee. Despite the pride and triumph evident in the assertion of the final stanza, this speaker, like that of the Petrarchan sequence, is characterized by his reverential relationship to his interlocutor. What appeared as a passage of intonational harmony in the poem, proves, at last, but another variant in the power struggle between speaker and listener.

The six voices surveyed here are merely a representation of the total which constitute “Child Harold”. They were selected because they represent the most pervasive voices in the poem and, inevitably, the largest of the stanza-song units. Many of the remainder, including those occurring in the 1:1 stanza-song units are admittedly more difficult to characterize in terms of literary models, although all may be analyzed intonationally on the basis of the power-relationship between speaker, listener and “object of utterance” used throughout this reading. For intonation, to quote Clark and Holquist, is “the sound that value makes,” and all the voices which contribute to the polyphony of “Child Harold” can be registered at a particular point upon a scale that mixes literary models with class dialect in a complex dialectic of power.¹⁹ Dialogue here, as in the text's ambivalent approach to the Romantic Imagination, is essentially a dialogue between polarized opposites.²⁰ The “powerful” voices of the Byronic aristocrat, the biblical prophet, and the ballad-singer, are continually challenged by that of the “powerless”: the peasant exile, the languishing courtly lover. Yet while these power relations are inscribed in class distinctions, they also cut across them. The ballad-singer uses the authority of the oral tradition to proclaim his love as proudly as the Byronic hero, while the Petrarchan lover, for all his literary sophistication, is representative of a discourse that is humble and ingratiating. Thus although the various voices which comprise the text are far from neutral politically, the power positions they represent intonationally are not necessarily commensurate with class. Neither do the voices which represent a dominant ideology and/or a dominant ideological position dominate the text's overall polyphonic structure. This brings us to the first of Bakhtin's criteria for the polyphonic text: the text as “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses” (p. 6).

The Bakhtinian definition of the polyphonic text demands absolute equality amongst its voices, even as it necessitates the absence of a transcendent authorial presence:

A character's word about himself and his world is just as fully weighted as the author's word usually is; it is not subordinated to the character's objectified image as merely one of his characteristics, nor does it serve as a mouthpiece for the author's voice. It possesses extraordinary independence in the structure of the work; it sounds, as it were, alongside the author's word and in a special way combines both with it and with the full and equally valid voices of other characters. (p. 7)

“Child Harold” satisfies both of these conditions. Powerful and powerless voices are engaged in a dialogue that is without a final victor. The authority of the Byronic aristocrat always stands to be undermined by the doubt and pathos of the peasant exile. As in a reading of the formal composition of the manuscripts, it is in the juxtaposition of these positions that the text's essential dialogism is to be found. Sometimes the transition is between individual units (such as the juxtaposition of the Byronic and Petrarchan sequences at the beginning of the poem); sometimes it is within them. Everywhere in the text it will be seen that one voice knocks against its neighbour; challenging, supporting or undermining it. Some of these voices recur frequently throughout the text, or may, as in the case of the Byronic and biblical discourses, exist in intimate dialogue with one another.

One of the key features of “Child Harold” as a whole, moreover, is its inter-textual bias which locates many of the voices as imitations or stylisations of other literary genre. None of these voices, as a consequence, can be said to be that of the essential “John Clare”. The personal pronoun of this poem, as was noted at the beginning of the article, is a picaresque adventure, a chameleon who adopts many personae, but who resides permanently in none.

This plurality of voices and the absence of any authorial unifying consciousness is inevitably realised as a structural feature. The polyphonic text is distinguished both by its tendency to simultaneity and its resistance to closure: “The fundamental category of Dostoevsky's mode of artistic visualizing was not evolution, but co-existence and interaction” (Problems, p. 28). Formally divided into a number of discrete stanza-song units, “Child Harold” invites a synchronic rather than a diachronic reading. While there may be consecutive development within the individual groups, in the poem as a whole the voices must be thought of as being simultaneous with one another. The text, as Tim Chilcott has acknowledged with respect to Clare's asylum poetry in general, does not “evolve” as much as “revolve.”²¹ Meanwhile, because none of these voices is finally dominant and because, semantically, they come to no final “conclusions,” “Child Harold” fulfills the final Bakhtinian criterion of the polyphonic text in being without closure. No synthesizing voice marks the beginning of this text; no voice, the end. The symphonic finalé that William Howard has proposed, presenting the last song of the MS 6 text as the poem's natural and inevitable conclusion, is better replaced by the metaphor of the musical “round,” in which all the voices are located at various points on an ever revolving circle.²² At some points these voices will harmonize; at others, counter-point. At all times, however, they will maintain a polyphony that depends on the essential plurality of “unmerged consciousnesses.”

Notes

1. Throughout his manuscripts Clare uses a system of line-divisions to indicate breaks in the text. A single under-line is used to separate individual stanzas and the verses of songs, while the double under-line always indicates the end of a piece of writing; be it song, stanza sequence, or biblical paraphrase. In Northampton MS 6 these line-divisions are of the utmost consequence since they effectively divide the poem into a series of discrete stanza-song units. The length of these stanza sequences varies considerably—from 1 to 8 stanzas—but all units end with a song. The distribution of the breaks (following the MS 6 order as published in the Robinson and Powell Later Poems (London: Clarendon, 1984), pp. 40-75) is as follows (with the oblique line [/] representing the end of each ruled-off unit): 1 stanza: 1 song / 1 stanza: 1 song / 1 stanza: 1 song / 1 stanza: 1 song / 8 stanzas: 1 song / 8 stanzas: 1 song / song / 4 stanzas: 1 song / 3 stanzas: 1 song / song / song / 2 stanzas: 1 song / song / 4 stanzas: 1 song / 1 stanza: 1 song / 6 stanzas: 1 song / 1 stanza: 1 song / stanza / 4 stanzas: 1 song / 1 stanza: 1 song / 1 stanza: 1 song / song. The reader will note that there are altogether five songs not belonging to a stanza group, but only one “independent stanza”’; the problematic “Honesty & good intentions are” (Later Poems, 1, p. 69). There has been long debate as to whether this stanza is part of the “Child Harold” poem. See Robinson and Summerfield's Later Poems (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1964), footnote p. 61, and Later Poems (1984), footnote p. 69, for contrasting points of view. No previous editors or commentators have noted the existence of these line-divisions, or their potential consequences for the reading of the poem. It should be noted, finally, that Northampton MS 19 is also divided up into stanza-song units in this way, although the units containing long stanza sequences are relatively few. A full description of the Northampton manuscripts is to be found in Chapter Four of my Ph. D. thesis: “John Clare and Mikhail Bakhtin—The Dialogic Principle: Readings from John Clare's Manuscripts 1832-1845” (University of Birmingham, England: 1987).

2. References (given after quotations in the text) will be to Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1984). Since it is not possible to give a full explication of Bakhtin's theses, it is hoped that characteristics (1) and (2) of the polyphonic text cited here will become self-evident in the course of the reading. Bakhtin's four varieties of “doubly-voiced” speech are summarized by David Lodge as follows:

   “Stylisation occurs when the writer borrows another's discourse and uses it for his own purposes—with the same general intention as the original, but in the process casting “a slight shadow of objectification over it”. … When such narration has the characteristics of oral discourse it is designated skaz in the Russian critical tradition. … Stylisation is to be distinguished from parody, when another's discourse is borrowed but turned to a purpose opposite to or incongrous with the intention of the original. … But there is another kind of doubly-oriented discourse which refers to, answers, or otherwise takes into account another speech-act never articulated in the text: hidden polemic is Bakhtin's suggestive name for one of the most common forms of discourse.” In “D. H. Lawrence and Dialogic Fiction,” Renaissance and Modern Studies, 29, 1985, 16-32.

3. The dialectical model of the Imagination as a “journey through evil and suffering … to a greater good” as proposed by M. H. Abrams in Natural Supernaturalism (1971) has been especially influential in determining an appropriate schema for the long poem.

4. “Child Harold” is to be found in two principal manuscripts: Northampton MS 6 and Northampton MS 8 (related material is also to be found in Northampton MSS 7, 49, 57 and Bodleian MSS Don. a. 8 and Don. c. 64). Of these sources, MS 8 is the earliest, being a small pocket-book Clare used first at the High Beech asylum, and then during his “escape”. As I have shown in my thesis, MS 8 is an extraordinary document in which poems, letters, paraphrases, accounts, and quotations are bizarrely juxtaposed. “Child Harold” and “Don Juan” are the two principal poems contained in the manuscript, while entries to the journal (“Journey Out of Essex”) frequently appear at the foot of the pages containing the poems.

5. Earlier commentators have shown that Clare effectively learnt to write poetry by imitation, and kept up the practice throughout his career. During one period he also executed a number of successful forgeries, passing off imitations of various sixteenth and seventeenth-century poets as “lost manuscripts.”

6. “Thus the new artistic position of the author with regard to the hero in Dostoevsky's polyphonic novel is a fully realised and fully consistent dialogic position, one that affirms the independence, internal freedom, unfinalizability, and indeterminacy of the hero. For the author the hero is not ‘he’ and not ‘I’ but a fully valid ‘thou,’ that is, another and autonomous ‘I’ (‘thou art’). (Problems, p. 63).

7. In an “advertisement” which appears in MS 8 (p. 38) Clare refers to the poem as a ‘new canto’ of “Child Harold”, suggesting that he regarded his poem as an addition to Byron's work.

8. See Robert Protherough: “A Study of John Clare's Poetry, with particular reference to the influence of books and writers on his development in the years 1820-1825” (unpublished B. Litt., Oxford, 1955). Protherough notes how the first lines of Byron's poems often acted as a stimulus for Clare, and cites several examples of this, including the first line of “Child Harold” (“Many are poets though they use no pen”).

9. Working with Bakhtin's concept of intonation Don Bialostosky has identified the active agents in any given utterance thus: “Every instance of intonation is oriented in two directions: with respect to the listener as ally or witness and with respect to the object of the utterance as the third, living participant whom the intonation scolds or carresses, denigrates or magnifies. This whole social orientation is what determines all aspects of intonation and makes it intelligible”. Don Bialostosky, Making Tales: The Poetics of Wordsworth's Narrative Experiments (London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984).

10. See Byron's Childe Harold, Canto III, stanza cxiv.

11. See Byron's Childe Harold, Canto III, stanza cxiv.

12. See for example: the opening stanza, “Many are poets—though they use no pen” (Later Poems, 1, p. 40); the song, “The sun has gone down” (Later Poems, 1, p. 43); the unit beginning “‘Tis pleasant now days hours begin to pass” (Later Poems, 1, p. 55); the stanza, “This life is made of lying & grimace” (Later Poems; 1, p. 59).

13. John Clare: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Merryn and Raymond Williams (London: Methuen, 1987).

14. See especially the MS 8 stanzas (presented at the end of the MS 6 text in Later Poems): “O she was more than fair—divinely fair” and “Her looks was like the spring her very voice” (p. 87) which adopt almost identical forms of eulogy to Sonnet 77 of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella.

15. Note also the thematic continuity provided by the numerous references to “rest” in both stanza and song.

16. See William Howard, John Clare TEAS (Boston: Twayne, 1981). Howard divides the poem into nine “movements” comparable to those of a musical symphony. The places he chooses for the breaks between movements are, however, very odd. With respect to the section of the poem in question, he proposes that the first movement end after the “Byronic” stanza “I have had many loves & seek no more.” This means that his second movement begins with “Cares gather round I snap their chains in two” and goes on to include the whole of the “Petrarchan” stanza sequence and the songs which follow. How he can have failed to observe a break between the “Thunderstorm” poem and “This twilight seems a veil of gause & mist” is hard to imagine.

17. In MS 6 these stanzas occur in opening 18 (pp. 34-5) directly opposite the Revelations paraphrase (see Later Poems, 1, p. 150) which includes the lines: “From me into hell everlasting & fire / With the devil's own tortures & never expire.”

18. See Mark Minor, “Clare, Byron, and the Bible: Additional Evidence from the Asylum Manuscripts”, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 85, Spring, 1982, 104-26. In this important article Minor discusses the thematic similarity between the paraphrases and the poems by grouping the former into categories such as “Promises or reminders of divine deliverance for Israel” and “Statements of Personal Affliction.”

19. Michael Clark and Katerina Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984). Clark and Holquist's explication of intonation is much to be recommended.

20. In a later section of my thesis I use the dialogic model as a means of exploring the ambivalence towards the discourse of the “Romantic Imagination” in Clare's writing, through a close examination of its imagery and syntax. Whereas here I have considered dialogic activity between “relatively whole utterances”, there I use it as a means for “explaining” the oscillations which are present within individual stanzas and songs.

21. See Tim Chilcott, “A Real World & Doubting Mind”: A Critical Study of the Poetry of John Clare (Hull: Hull Univ. Press, 1985), p. 228.

22. Howard's reading of “Child Harold” is based on the assumption by no means incontrovertible, that Clare's “Winter Canto” is the “official” ending of the poem (i.e., he ignores the fact that the MS 8 stanzas—printed by Robinson and Powell immediately following the end of the MS 6 text—might have been written later). Even the fact that what he designates the “Winter Canto” consists of just one stanza and one song, does not deter him. He concludes: “Clare could not have added anything to ‘Child Harold’ without running the risk (already apparent in several stanzas and songs of the autumn canto) of being too repetitive. Contrary to the view that ‘Child Harold’ is an incomplete poem, the song ‘In this cold world without a home / Disconsolate I go’ brings the poem to a logical end.”