Readers of John Clare’s poetry know what the political orientation ought to be, if the poetry is to have such an orientation. Enclosure consolidated ownership of the lands in the hands of the few for the sake of intensified agricultural practices, increased output, and increased profits for the land’s owners. The practice of enclosure had commenced in England centuries before Clare’s era, but it intensified from the middle of the eighteenth century, alongside the early stirrings of industrialization, the displacement of rural populaces to cities, and the demographic uptick that gave rise to Malthus’ worries of mass starvation. Prior to enclosure, commons had been shared among the rural peasantry whose adjudication of rights of use seems to have followed the communitarian practices modeled by Elinor Ostrom, and not the tragic exhaustion of resources against which she argued. The tragedy of the commons was, for many, a tragedy of their disappearance. When John Clare’s village of Helpston was enclosed in 1809, he was a young man of 16, not yet mature as a poet or individual. In “The Mores” (the landscape feature, moors, though I wonder at the possibility of a pun on the Latinate “mores,” for customs) he writes explicitly of how enclosure (which he names in the poem, “inclosure”) was experienced. This is the second half of the poem:

.

And sky-bound mores in mangled garbs are left

Like mighty giants of their limbs bereft

Fence now meets fence in owners’ little bounds

Of field and meadow large as garden grounds

In little parcels little minds to please

With men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease

Each little path that led its pleasant way

As sweet as morning leading night astray

Where little flowers bloomed round a varied host

That travel felt delighted to be lost

Nor grudged the steps that he had ta’en as vain

When right roads traced his journeys and again—

Nay, on a broken tree he’d sit awhile

To see the mores and fields and meadows smile

Sometimes with cowslaps smothered—then all white

With daiseys—then the summer’s splendid sight

Of cornfields crimson o’er the headache bloomd

Like splendid armys for the battle plumed

He gazed upon them with wild fancy’s eye

As fallen landscapes from an evening sky

These paths are stopt—the rude philistine’s thrall

Is laid upon them and destroyed them all

Each little tyrant with his little sign

Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine

But paths to freedom and to childhood deer

A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’

And on the tree with ivy overhung

The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung

As tho’ the very birds should learn to know

When they go there they must no further go

Thus, with the poor, scared freedom bade goodbye

And much they feel it in the smothered sigh

And birds and trees and flowers without a name

All sighed when lawless law’s enclosure came

And dreams of plunder in such rebel schemes

Have found too truly that they were but dreams.

.

“Philistines” here are the Biblical foes of Samson, not the middle-cult foes against whom Matthew Arnold waged his battles. The implication perhaps is that a Samson is needed to rise up, and it might be that Clare is such a Samson. This would allow us to see his most famous nature poems—the highly localized accounts of a moment—as carrying out a political struggle that is not announced in them.

For Clare does not often write in any obvious way about the “lawless law” of enclosure that was imposed on the commons of Helpston. It is this absence of enclosure from so many poems that obstructs those who would read it in a political light; it can seem that they are directing such a light on it, rather than that it illuminates its political significance from within. A poem about seeking a bird’s nest, with no mention of enclosure or even disrupted life, is not, in its own terms, political, though it might have been motivated by a political event—and we can read it as such, or else we can find in its attentiveness to the natural world something akin to an ecopolitics, a cosmology encompassing man and nature in a broader order.

What seems most interesting to me in Clare’s poetry is not the attention he pays to nature per se, but the way in which his attention to the natural world is drawn through the poems so as to arrive at enclosures of very different kinds from what Clare’s Helpston knew in 1809. Enclosure, in other words, is as common as nature in Clare’s poetry, and it is one of the glories of the poetry to arrive at those natural, ephemeral, hidden enclosures that are sources of healing and respite from the no less ephemeral, natural, and, if not neglected then at least unnoticed, strokes of violence and disruption in the natural world. Clare’s achievement as a poet cannot be described without an account of what he does to arrive at these enclosures, as abrupt and delicate to his perception as they are sudden and fortuitous in the collisions of nature’s parts, into the language and structure of the poetry. The poems not only record the presence of enclosures or the journey to them: they embody, and constitute, the enclosures that arise within a patch of landscape—and not just in a patch of landscape’s physical space, as a sum of parts described in sequence, but in the moment of time that unites the patch as a distinct entity. The poems recognize the experience of enclosure as something that arises within the natural world, phenomenologically, and the poems are the vehicle for that phenomenology. They do not relay it as something that has happened and will now, in a poem, be recalled. Instead, the poems identify with the experience—they become that experience—and make it possible to call it an experience at all.

I say “the poems,” but I am referring to the crowning achievement of the poems of the Northborough, written in Clare’s maturity before his fullest combat with mental illness; perhaps the remove from Helpston bound him less to the local historical changes he knew from childhood there, allowing him to reckon with them on other terms. In these poems, at any rate, something happens in nature as a consequence of its being seen, experienced, and shaped into a poem, just as something happens to language and poetry as a consequence of being given over to the enclosures of time and experience that inhere in the natural world. These enclosures are positive alternatives to the enclosures of the big landowners: they are ephemeral, happenstance, provisional, “something given” (to borrow Wordsworth’s beautiful phrase). They imply a different sort of order to life and the world, one which does not claim absolute or permanent dominion; they suggest also how nature, if one attends to it correctly, contains within itself the potential to resolve into small unities that can claim the permanence of perception within the contingency of a moment and all that aligns within it. Clare’s poetry both is made by and makes such unities. It finds stable form in the rapidly, unpredictably shifting constellations of what nature offers to attention.

Here is one of Clare’s descriptive poems from the Northborough years:

“November”

.

The shepherds almost wonder where they dwell

And the old dog for his night journey stares

The path leads somewhere but they cannot tell

And neighbour meets with neighbour unawares

The maiden passes close beside her cow

And wonders on and think[s] her far away

The ploughman goes unseen and behind his plough

And seems to loose his horses half the day

The lazy mist creeps on in journey slow

The maidens shout and wonder where they go

So dull and dark are the november days

The lazy mist high up the evening curled

And now the morn quite hides in smokey haze

The place we occupy seems all the world

.

The question about this and a great many of Clare’s poems concerns why they unite into a whole at all; and in a sense, this is a question of any enclosure, as it is, say, of the boundaries of nations imposed by an Empire. An enclosure is felt to violate nature by imposing limits that do not unify. Against this, Clare offers a vision of nature that occasions unities without enduring limits. But against that, he suggests that the tried-and-true form of the sonnet (flourishing in the early 19th century, thanks in part to Wordsworth’s revival of the Miltonic political sonnet) can serve to demarcate that unity. The limits of the poem are fixed to offer the contrast with the limits of the natural world, which are in flux; we would not be able to recognize the momentary, bursting unity of nature without this stable grounding of the sonnet and its rhyme schemes. At the same time, in the rhyme scheme itself, Clare sets stability against flux: the fact of rhyme is predictable across sonnets (to this point in literary history) and certainly across Clare’s sonnets, but within the rhyme scheme we find unexpected patterns emerging, as in the couplet of “journey slow” and “where they go” prior to the final quatrain, and rhyming either wholly or in a slant rhyme with “plough” and “cow.” Something is closed with that couplet: as the maidens “shout and wonder where they go,” so the poem does the same, coming up short of its full fourteen lines, as if it had no choice but to conclude. But then the final quatrain opens, the form of the poem leading not out of the mist, but out of the uncertainty of where to go within it. At first it seems that Clare’s final quatrain is a generalization, as if he is stepping back to reflect on what he is said.  But that impression is upset by the abrupt “now,” at which moment Clare descends into the poem’s present moment, where he is most assured. The word “now” is crucial in other ways, too. It refers to the enclosure of a moment—the measure of time that cannot be reduced to units, an expression of experience that Kierkegaard rightly suggests is both within and beyond worldly time. And that temporal enclosure is here coincident with a spatial and phenomenological enclosure: “The place we occupy seems all the world.” “World” rhymes with “curled,” and it is this turning in of experience, place, and time upon themselves, indistinguishable from one another, that the poem effects as it is rounded out formally.

Clare does not always proceed this way, but power is lost when he steps beyond the enclosure of the poem in the poem itself. This is “The Reed Bird”:

.

A little slender bird of reddish brown

With frequent haste pops in and out the reeds

And on the river frequent flutters down

As if for food and so securely feeds

Her little young that in their ambush needs

Her frequent journeys hid in thickest shade

Where danger never finds a path to throw

A fear on comforts nest securely made

In woods of reeds round which the waters flow

Save by a jelted stone that boys will throw

Or passing rustle of the fishers boat

It is the reed bird prized for pleasant note

Ah happy songster man can seldom share

A spot as hidden from the haunts of care

.

This is not a clumsy poem; the double couplet at the end registers formally the double conclusion, one belonging to the description of the scene, the other to the sonnet proper. But the formal acknowledgement that something does not fully inhabit the form cannot make up for Clare’s poem not fully inhabiting the “spot as hidden.” In its defense, the poem’s point is that we can only seldom share so hidden a spot, and so it is apt that the poet and poem fail to enter there; Clare does not do what he claims cannot easily be done. And yet, the fact of exclusion is accompanied by much feeling; the lines are not so much complacent as they are muted. Though in the rhyme of “throw” and “throw,” where the claustrophobic rhyme shuts off the poem as the thicket shuts out the violence of “throw,” in general the poem states but does not apprehend that there is an enclosure into which it cannot enter. Even from without, the enclosure’s limits are not fully part of the experience it describes. Compare “Sheep in Winter”:

.

The sheep get up and make their many tracks

And bear a load of snow upon their backs

And gnaw the frozen turnip to the ground

With sharp quick bite and then go noising round

The boy that pecks the turnips all the day

And knocks his hands to keep the cold away

And laps his legs in straw to keep them warm

And hides behind the hedges from the storm

The sheep as tame as dogs go where he goes

And try to shake their fleeces from the snows

Then leave their frozen meal and wander round

The stubble stack that stands beside the ground

And lye all night and face the drizzling storm

And shun the hovel where they might be warm

.

The rhymes huddle with “warm”/“storm” and “ground”/ “round” both repeating, and more than repeating, coming together in the final four lines, so that in a poem about exposure, there is inward-facing herding. Like a key clicking in the lock, the word “shun” brings the poem to its close, and the force of that verb, the dignity it imputes to the silly sheep, registers like a moral to the poem: better to refuse the hovel that marks a loss of independence.

The steady rhymes of Clare’s poetry, regular but capable of the variation we’ve seen, provide a simple tool for achieving complexity. Another is found in the syntactical organization of Clare’s poetry. The lack of punctuation in Clare’s poems is frequently heralded as a resistance to the standard grammatical English of his day: Clare the rural poet (though he did not want to be reduced to the caricature) refusing the regional imperialism of the metropole. Less frequently noted is that Clare does not merely forego the conventions of punctuation. Doing so, he falls back almost exclusively upon coordination of phrases so simple as to resemble parataxis: “and” and “then” are the principle coordinating words, so that units of sense are not difficult to discern regardless of punctuation. Within this simplicity, Clare finds the complexity of occasional enjambment between lines, (e.g., “then leave their frozen…beside the ground”); and other variation and complexity is afforded when the object of a verb is a clause that extends over several lines (“go noising round/the boy…hides behind the hedges from the storm” where four lines describe the actions of the boy who the sheep go nosing round). This represents an extraordinary constraint for Clare to place upon himself as often as he does, and yet it is within this constraint that he finds his own creative possibility. “Shun” lands as it does, and lands the poem as it does, because each item in the list, and most lines, must suspend from a verb, so that the poem swings from start to end, as along monkey-bars: “get up,” “make,” “bear,” “gnaw,” “noising round,” “pecks*,” “knocks…to keep*,” “laps…to keep*,” “hides*,” “go,” “try to shake,” “leave...wander,” “stands,” “lye…face,” “shun.” I’ve indicated with an asterisk the verbs that belong to the boy, whom the sheep follow, and we can see the difference in his verbs from theirs. “Keep,” used in the phrases “to keep the cold away” and also “to keep them warm,” reflects a twofold difference of boy and sheep, first that he must struggle to stay warm and second that he holds in and holds on. Most significant is that sheep and poem alike abandon him when he “hides” from the storm. They refuse him and refuse his shelter, as they refuse the hovel “where they might be warm.” It’s only with the last phrase that the poem acknowledges that they are in fact cold, but there has been no need to acknowledge it, since it does not move them as it does the boy, out of the air, into a closed space. They are open to the world, to the drizzling storm, and yet in their refusal to be otherwise, the poem finds its own closed form; they contain, in their being, a place that seems “all the world” to them. That these are sheep, who are domesticated, and whose lives are circumscribed by manmade bounds, makes the allegorical potential, never insisted on, all the greater: they are not wild, but are admirable in their rejection of the enclosures provided for them. The poem is without a note of heroism, perhaps because such a note, applied to sheep, would be mock-heroic if not outright mocking; but in the word “shun” they rise to become more than sheep, since “shun” implies judgment, discernment, as well as fortitude. In the word “shun,” the possibility of political, as well as animal, instinct dwells. This poem recognizes or gives shape to an enclosed existence that is other than what can be imposed from humankind; it suggests an alternative that experiences hardship without suffering.

More often, though, Clare turns to a place of safety: a nest.

.

“The Squirrel’s Nest”

.

One day when all the woods where bare and blea

I wandered out to take a pleasant walk

And saw a strange formed nest on stoven tree

Where startled pigeon buzzed from bouncing hawk

I wondered strangley what the nest could be

And thought besure it was some foreign bird

So up I scrambled in the highest glee

And my heart jumpt at every thing that stirred

Twas oval shaped strange wonder filled my breast

I hoped to catch the old one on the nest

When somthing bolted out I turned to see

And a brown squirrel puttered up the tree

Twas lined with moss and leaves compact and strong

I sluthered down and wondering went along

.

Whereas in “The Reed Bird,” Clare expounds on the distance of mankind and nature, this poem apprehends it in its very wording. In this poem, Clare risks a charge of ungainliness, hazarding so much on the repetition and interplay of two words: “strange” and “wonder.”  “Wonder” is brought into the poem in the fifth line, alongside “strangley,” but it can be detected within “wandered” in the second line, a kinship of sound and sense that shows itself in the final line, where “wondering went along” suggests “wandering went along.”  Discounting “wandered out,” “wonder” and “strange” (and cognates) appear three times each in the poem, and on two occasions they are united: “I wondered strangley” and “twas oval shaped strange wonder.” In the latter phrase, Clare deviates from his syntactical practice; “shaped strange” suspends itself in ambiguity, “strange” attaching to both “shaped” and “wonder,” and binding them to one another, so that the wonder can be felt to be strange on account of the shape, the shape strange in so far as it inspires wonder. On its first appearance in the poem, “strange” had attached to “formed”: “a strange formed nest on stoven tree.” On its second, as I’ve said, it attached to “wondered” in “I wondered strangley.”  The ambiguous placement of “twas oval shaped strange wonder” therefore unites the two. And in this union, there is another meaning present that I’ve not considered: that the wonder itself is oval shaped, a nest within the poet that mirrors the nest he finds in the tree, an enclosure of wonder within his breast, one that fills his breast, but that in so far as it is “oval shaped” and “strange,” one leaves him excluded from its inward space—perhaps this is true of all wonder, Clare’s ability to apprehend the rare feeling without the invocation of the sublime being one of his gifts. Appearing even once, the word “strange” would both mean that which is unusual and also suggest estrangement; appearing three times in fourteen lines, the word itself comes to feel estranged from Clare, as he returns to it, baffled by strangeness itself, as well as by the fact that wonder and the form of the nest can be said to be strange. He is at a double remove, in other words, first finding the world and wonder strange, and then finding strange the strangeness itself. The resolution of the poem, and the disorienting strangeness of strangeness, is made possible by a doubling of the nests. All of these feelings that I’ve discussed—the curious compounds of wonder and strange—are occasioned by the first nest, that of the bird. Then his attention is broken, “somthing bolted out I turned to see,” and he sees the second nest, the squirrel’s, which sates or confirms something: we do not know what. It is “lined with moss and leaves compact and strong” and then Clare descends and “wondering” went along. It has not erased or quelled the wonder, but it has reconciled him to it, has made it something that moves him on, enclosed within his being. It is no longer, it seems, as strange as it was. The rupture of wonder has been repaired, as the wonder has repaired something in Clare, allowing him to find closure to the poem as well as to the experience.

Repair, restoration, recovery: these are the ends of a great deal of literature (great and not-so-great), whether they are fully realized by the literature or whether it is their failure that is dramatized, or even their necessity, literature attending to the sources and circumstances of rupture as well healing those ruptures with the scar tissue of language. What these words mean differs from poet to poet, author to author, and how the poem not only shows but participates in and enacts them differs no less. They are not inherently political, since they can be inwardly felt and psychological, but in a number of these posts that I’ve written, their political aspect can be seen, whether in the case of Baudelaire’s recovery of a declamatory style to extend and repair a civilization inclusive of much that has been denied or pushed to the edges of consciousness; or whether in the case of Donne’s need to repair the private existence in the bonds of an intimacy with another; or in Robert Lowell’s self-repair, which is not merely psychological, but also historical and public; or in Lucille Clifton’s beautiful “jasper texas 1998” that gapes like a wound that refuses worldly healing. One reason that repair, recovery, and restoration (and we could go further, extend to redemption—the reparation of value) reach so naturally into political consciousness is that they are inherently normative, supposing as they do a right or better way of being. It might be that for the imagination to make good on its promise is for it to make good on its potential to repair its own understanding and feeling for the world, and also to repair our sense of what reparation and rupture might be.

Clare’s poetry does not redeem the very notion of enclosure, exactly, but it denies those who would value enclosure as being one sort of thing, imposed to permanently possess by means of dispossession. Enclosure, Clare would suggest, is natural, and it is natural to seek it, and arrive at it, and to yearn for it; but he restores the concept—repairs it—from what it has become, recovering its variety and delicacy, its being something that does not depend on possession, but that arises in a disarming encounter with something beyond oneself. Rather than enclosures that stake themselves to permanent limits, Clare’s poetry testifies to the permanence of enclosures that are themselves persistently coming and going, discovered and abandoned, disclosed and obscured, as fleeting as human attention and inviting, rather than hindering, his wondering wandering through the world.