John Clare, Ampersands & Ecological Entanglement

 

I have been working on a small collection of poems, tentatively titled Ampersands, which I am hoping to release in the new year. This will be my first self-published collection (not including the poems in Goblin Realism, which, incidentally, I will also be publishing the second edition of which around a similar time). I have compiled around twelve short poems, potentially stretching that number to fifteen depending on the amount of poetic creativity I can conjure before its publication. I have also been experimenting with collage to accompany the words, but these are still at the level of very-basic experimentation. I do like the idea of having art alongside the poems, though, something along the same manner as William Blake's illuminated works (precursor to zines that these are?).

I use a lot of ampersands in my poetry, hence the title, which is something I have borrowed from John Clare, especially his long poem The Shepherd's Calendar. As a poet of nature and place, I think Clare is better than Wordsworth. His nature poetry is less a conjuration of “landscape” - a word and a mode of spatial engagement tied up with anthropocentrism, colonialism and capitalism – and more a reflection of the multiplicitous, ecological enmeshment of dwelling-spaces. Rather than panoramic, sublime prospects, we have the closeness and intimacy of hedgerows, paths, bird nests. Instead of feelings of beauty and awe, the romantic sensations we attribute to a sublime nature-as-Other, Clare details his feelings of anxiety, ambivalence, but also a sense of love and familiarity with the living world around him. This is not a nature distinct and far from the madding crowd, but a nature you find yourself and your everyday (yet still deeply strange) feelings deeply entangled with.

The edition of The Shepherd's Calendar I have contains two versions of the poem, the original “manuscript” version and the 1827 “published” version. It is only in the manuscript version that you find the frequent use of ampersands and a host of other “radical” poetic devices which are absent from the “cleaned up” published version. In the introduction, Tim Chilcott touches on the ongoing debate regarding how much Clare's poetry, with its “political radicalism” and “sexual frankness”, was censored by his publisher, John Taylor. Whilst Chilcott rejects the notion that Taylor played a purely censorious role, (instead showing how the published version of the poem was rather more a product of active collaboration between the two) the differences between the two versions can be striking. Despite the 1827 version being, apparently, the result of such a productive collaboration, its neatness and “selection” fails to capture the immediacy and underlying complexity of Clare's original work.

For instance, whereas Clare's was a “poetry of documentary energy and richness, where all the details of his native village of Helpston advanced into a democratic foreground of attention” (Chilcott in Clare, ix), Taylor found that this “imaginative inclusivity” resulted in long, repetitive lists which might bore a reading public looking for rural escapism. Yet, this was a decidedly bourgeois reading public, whose taste for the countryside was shaped strongly by the aesthetic categories of the picturesque, which were themselves developed along the lines of an outwardly expansionist (colonial) and inwardly regulating (capitalist), ruling class agenda. The reading public's Clare was the “peasant poet,” transformed into a spectacle of rural impoverishment and folk authenticity. This was a transformation aided by Taylor's “cleaning up” of his poetry. In actuality, the “inclusive,” long lists of The Shepherd's Calendar are an integral part of the poem, as Clare self-reflexively demonstrates:

My wild field catalogue of flowers
Grows in my rhymes as thick as showers
Tedious & long as they may be
To some they never weary me
Then wood & mead & field of grain
I could hunt oer & oer again
& talk to every blossom wild
Fond as a parent to a child...

(Clare, 94 & 96)

These lines are tellingly absent from the 1827 version, but they indicate the different priorities of Clare's original, poetic vision. He is honest about the uniqueness of his experience and his feelings, feelings perhaps not shared by others. Rather than nature being sublime or beautiful, as an urban readership might expect, we have nature as simultaneously “tedious” and invigorating. Furthermore, rather than nature manifested as a fixed spectacle, gathered into a “landscape”, we are presented with nature as a fragmentary, ever-expanding catalogue which points in different directions. There is, at least for modern readers, a sense of immediacy of experience which the Lake Poets' careful, romantic mediation lacks – a sense of entanglement with the natural world which is an ongoing process, rather than a means to personal revelation, or purely contemplative end. It is interesting that, for Clare, his interaction with “blossom wild” is likened to a parental relationship, albeit one where our contemporary sense of nature as “mother” is subverted and, in fact, nature becomes the child. Whilst this comparison might be anachronistic (I am unsure of the usage of the phrase “mother nature” in regency-era England), there is certainly something subversive and deeply personal about Clare's relationship with the natural world as he describes it.

Indeed, the “documentary intensity” of the poem cannot be understood as an attempt to capture and document specimens of the natural world to present to the curious urban reader. Nor does it present a linear process of solitary rumination within the natural world that leads unerringly to spiritual elevation and intellectual enrichment. No, the documentary style of Clare's poetry presents an aesthetic of the impersonal that reflects the ongoing processes of entanglement and enmeshment within a locale. The boundary between human and inhuman is often blurred (or trespassed), with their differing rhythms finding a mutual origin in the changing of the seasons. Here is an excerpt from 'May':

While wood men still on spring intrudes
& thins the shadow[s] solitudes
Wi sharpend axes felling down
The oak trees budding into brown
Were as they crash upon the ground
A crowd of labourers gather round
& mix among the shadows dark
To rip the crackling staining bark
From off the tree & lay when done
The rolls in lares to meet the sun
Depriving yearly were they come
The green wood pecker of its home
That early in the spring began
Far from the sight of troubling man
& bord their round holes in each tree
In fancys sweet security
Till startld wi the woodmans noise
It waks from all its dreaming joys
The blue bells too that thickly bloom
Were man was never feard to come
& smell smocks that from view retires
Mong rustling leaves & bowing briars
& stooping lilys of the valley
That comes wi shades & dews to dally
White beading drops on slender threads
Wi broad hood leaves above their heads
Like white robd maids in summer hours
Neath umbrellas shunning showers
These neath the barkmens crushing treads
Oft perish in their blooming beds...

(Clare, 90 & 92)

For me, the ampersand comes to represent a fundamental principle of Clare's ecopoetic vision. This principle cannot be entirely defined beyond the symbol, &, but its effects can be felt throughout the manuscript version of The Shepherd's Calendar. It stands for inclusion, simultaneity, co-dependence, a disregard for formality and language as a static phenomenon. It represents the ongoing process which is “Place”, where things figure only as they relate to other things. It can also represent destruction and loss. Indeed, as Clare shows, his locale is no pastoral Eden, as the activity of the “wood men” destroys the habitat of the woodpecker, which had made its nest earlier in Spring. We also encounter the “stooping lilys” which get crushed under the tread of the “bark mens”, something Clare presents as both incidental but also tragic through his likening of the flower to “maids in summer hours”.

As such, the ampersands is deployed to create a sense of ecological realism rather than rural idealism. It serves to expose and make-known the web of relationships that exist between the human and inhuman worlds. The effect of this knowledge is not one of mastery over nature, but gestures towards the ultimately-unknowable extent of our interdependence with the inhuman world. The discourse on landscape aesthetics and the picturesque, which informed much of the romantics' nature poetry, as well as the poetry of proto-romantics like James Thomson etc, whilst I cannot identify it entirely as a product of industrial capitalism and colonial expansion, certainly seems to have served those ends well. The focus on selection, of including certain things while rejecting others, ends up creating a false sense of what actually constitutes the environment. The sublime and beautiful landscapes of Wordsworth always seem to provide a ready-to-hand sense of connection and inner revelation, but how much can this be shared by others across the globe, or even the Lake District?

Personally, I find Wordsworth to be a valid “nature poet” still, as much of his work is about the personal, individualised experience of the inhuman world. Yet, it is largely in that poet's afterlife, in the continuing dominance of “picturesque” forms of aesthetic engagement with place, a tendency to see nature but not ecology, to cherish very particular spots of beauty whilst rubbish clogs up elsewhere. This kind of selection is exactly how capitalism works and can be seen in numerous other instances; the privileging of certain areas, certain classes, certain races, certain abilities, over others, combined with a direct exploitation of that which doesn't fit these exclusive categories. When we think of the environment, it is imperative that we think ecologically as Clare does. It isn't enough to conjure any singular idea of what “nature” is or can be, finding a tucked away corner of the world to call one's own and exist with harmoniously. This can only be a mystification, a kind of fetishisation that shrouds nature's underlying multiplicity. Even within those ideal locales that do exist, our simple enjoyment can often be at the expense of others without us even being aware of it.

Work cited:

Clare, J. (ed. Chilcott, T.) (2006) The Shepherd's Calendar, Manchester: Carcanet.