Nature Versus Man in DW's Alfoxden Journal and Clare's Poems

I found a strange consistency in thematic content and subject matter in all three of our readings for this week, but felt this connection most strongly between Dorothy Wordsworth's Alfoxden journal and Clare's poems. The Alfoxden journal seems like a collection of reflections on "rambles" (akin to Clare's titular ramble), where the Grasmere journal seemed more concerned with the putting-down of daily routines and social interactions. At the heart of both selections, however, I find an affinity for nature's peculiarities and an aversion to man's dominion over them.

What I find most fascinating about the Alfoxden journals is that they are written largely in fragment form, where the Grasmere journal seemed more "journalistic," for lack of a better term. The Alfoxden journal verges on poetic language at various points, most so when DW seems particularly impassioned over her subject matter. This heightened passion also seems to coincide with DW's "rambles," both those accompanied and unaccompanied. DW notes after a walk in January that she and her party "could never hear [the sea] in summer," which they "attribute . . . partly to the bareness of the trees, but chiefly to the absence of the singing of birds, the hum of insects, that noiseless noise which lives in the summer air" (142). This noted absence of birds and insects smacked of Clare's "bird poems," with their precision and display of specialized knowledge (I was reminded of Stephanie Kuduk Weiner's comment about how expert ornithologists can identify birds not only by their calls, but also simply by the sound of their wings.)

On page 152, DW describes the "squire's grounds": "Quaint waterfalls about, where Nature was very successfully striving to make beautiful what art had deformed--ruins, hermitages . . . In spite of all these things, the dell romantic and beautiful, though everywhere planted with unnaturalised trees. Happily we cannot shape the huge hills, or carve out the valleys according to our fancy." It is interesting to note that where DW is concerned with the additions man has made to the landscape (the ruins and hermitages, and the "unnaturalised" trees, which I take for an invasive or non-native species [or at the very least, trees planted for show/landscaping purposes]), Clare is rather upset by man's deductions, as in "To a Fallen Elm." Addressing the tree, Clare describes the relationship between the elm and the axman who chops it down: "I see a picture that thy fate displays / And learn a lesson from thy destiny / Self interest saw thee stand in freedoms ways / So thy old shadow must a tyrant be" (97). Clare later chides the axman for "bark[ing] of freedom" as he cuts down the tree, and describes him in no uncertain terms as an "oer bearing fool" (98). "Such was thy ruin music making elm" (98), Clare mourns, making another unintentional parallel with DW's description of the trees' roles in the summer's "noiseless noise."

Though Clare's rhetoric is decidedly more political than DW's, they seem to share the same concern--that man's additions and deductions may be impacting the environment in equally destructive ways, and that at the heart of this destruction is man's desire for agency over nature. I am thus fascinated by this idea of "man's freedom" versus "nature's tyranny"...what can we make of this dilemma? Are the details noted by Clare and DW examples of ecophobia? Are these passages to be read as attempts to dismantle the stranglehold of the picturesque, the first rumblings of industrialization, or both?