What Does the Bird Say?

Stephanie Kuduk Weiner’s Listening With John Clare asserts that Clare’s poetry exhibits great progress through the act of acutely listening to nature and birdsong in particular. She begins her argument by suggesting that Clare’s use of first person allows him to help the reader learn to listen to nature in the same way as Clare. Weiner then explores Clare’s use of unusual syntax to bring various “sound images” to the foreground. The strongest portion of her argument is her assertion that Clare’s poems “present a coherent music whose separate sounds are shown to interrelate in numerous ways” (381). The sounds in “[The sparrow chirps the spring begun]” build on top of each other to create a quite noisy text. However, Weiner’s high praise of Clare’s use of onomatopoeia in The Progress of Rhyme falls short.

While Weiner makes a fairly strong argument to support her overall claims regarding the importance of listening in Clare’s works, I argue that Clare’s act of listening does not go far enough as his poetry does little more than record the birds’ sounds  while maintaining a human centric perspective. Weiner further claims that Clare’s use of first person clearly demonstrates the shift from his early poems to a more mature style. However, this is precisely the problem. Clare’s poems continue to describe nature as a sort of backdrop surrounding the enlightened poet.

Weiner’s primary evidence of Clare’s expertise in the use of onomatopoeia, his poem entitled The Progress of Rhyme, presents the nightingale’s song as either clearly enunciated gibberish or phrases sung directly to the benefit of Clare himself. While his precise recording of these sounds may be praised as an accomplishment, it does little to illuminate what statements or emotions the birds are actually voicing. This may seem like an impossible task, but at least striving to understand the meaning of these intonations and the possibility that they have nothing to do with the welfare or pleasure of humans would demonstrate true progress.

In many ways, this appears similar to the Ylvis’s 2013 hit song, The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?). While Clare’s poetry clearly presents a higher level of aesthetic value, the song was also praised for incorporating the true sounds of several species of fox. (See The Wired, “What Does the Fox Say?  The Viral Music Video Isn’t Totally Wrong” September 6, 2013.) Clare similarly records fairly accurate bird sounds, but this does not seem revolutionary for a poet. Poets have been attentive listeners of communication for centuries.

This is not to say that Clare is a poor poet or that these works do not provide evidence of an attentive ear to the sounds of nature. However, they also represent a human centric perspective that subverts true ecological awareness and a healthy relationship between man and the environment.

I am interested in further exploring comparisons among the relationships between Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Clare and the environment. Wordsworth seems to be more aware of problems caused by his intrusion into a natural setting.

I also would like to examine how Clare’s “sound images” compare with the picturesque.

Finally, I would like to know if any other readers found Clare’s poems to be too noisy. By the time I finished reading them, I wanted peace and quiet. Does that prove their effectiveness?