Put a Bird on It--Clare's Bird Poems

It’s striking how often these poems tend to bring the reader’s gaze toward the ground: to weeds, puddles, flowers, pebbles, and, of course, the birds’ nests themselves. While some of Wordsworth’s poems observe nature through a narrower aperture (The Waterfall and the Eglantine, The Oak and the Broom, A Pastoral—both conspicuously personified and engaged in “lessons” of some sort), we could say Wordsworth is a poet more concerned with vistas and horizons. This made me wonder to what degree the Romantic poetic horizon or scope of vision is connected to class. What “horizon” is available to Clare, and, similarly, does Wordsworth’s affluence preclude certain types of engagement with the natural world? How might we situate Clare’s poetics (as we can determine it thus far) in terms of the critical material we’re engaging?

As Jason was, I was also interested in the lack of punctuation in Clare’s poems. The sonnets and poems written in short stanzas were much easier to read, and I wondered about the difference in communicative intent between, for example, Crows in Spring and The Robins Nest. Although there are many sonnet-length nest poems, I thought that the open-endedness of the longer poems might speak to an anxiety about not only closing things in (as mentioned in the introduction) but also about breaking some kind of covenant. The discoveries of Clare’s speakers are often very private events: how much is he trying to conceal even as he reveals?

While Clare personifies and projects as Wordsworth does, we almost get a sense of the poet shrinking in order to experience and report back from unexceptional yet hardly quotidian engagements with a nature both constructed and engaged much differently from Wordsworth’s. I found myself interested in the bird that “dreamth wrong” in The Firetails Nest juxtaposed with the clown who “thinks the strange bird guards a serpents nest” in The Wrynecks Nest. In Clare’s poems, neither people nor birds have a monopoly on “understanding” the world they belong to. As in The Nightingales Nest, the speakers, especially, seem to struggle toward that which remains “hidden as a thought unborn.” Is “deep ecology” behind this thought that Clare’s poems grope toward?