Clare's Bird Poems.

In Clare’s poems, there is a difference between the poems that have the “I” voice and those that more or less have a third person narrator. The “Thrushes Nest” and “The Wren” both (210-11), for example, present the “I” as a center around the beginning and the end of the poem; the ending is an expected outcome, presented in the past-tense. The expected outcome in the former is the “brood of natures minstrels” "witnessed" in the “sunshine and the laughing sky”; “the happy stories of the past,” in the latter, stabilizes the center of the perspective of the mediator. The poems in the third person, lacking the “I,” tend to be about moments of being—moments of performance or action, embedded within a moment of being—written in the present tense. “The March Nightingale,” for example, is written in the third person, in the present tense, and is about a bird performing an action in an indefinite space in time, carried on by the distant human mediator for an indefinite space in time: “. . . the wondering boy / Listens again—again the sound he hears / And mocks it in his song for very joy” (210). “Again” and “again” he "hears." This sense of perpetual stasis is augmented by the lack of punctuation. Any sentence, with commas, contractions, periods, etc., allows the reader to stop and start, to leave the poem and return to the following sentence without having to start over again from the beginning. These poems almost demand that you read them in one setting because of the lack of punctuation; the performance of reading mimics a sense of being in the moment. In this way, Clare mimics consciousness. How do you think these poems compares to L. B., that is, if he we think of L. B. as a guide to nature? Does Clare present a less commodifiable product by meddling with structure? What does he lose or gain?