Abstract
Clare attends to a range of rural ruins in his work. This chapter focuses on the way in which Clare’s lyric poems often deal with ruins in obscure rural locales, asking us to notice things going on in English culture that would otherwise remain unknown. As this chapter makes clear by a reading of Clare’s lyrics against poems by Wordsworth and a poem by Robert Southey, what we see in Clare is a sense of ongoing, active ruination: this effects a fundamental reconsideration of the visionary and narrative impulses that lie behind Romantic responses to ruins. But Clare is also interested in ruins as sites for aesthetic contemplation and imaginative engagement: such a range of complex responses make him a significant commentator on ruins.
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Notes
- 1.
See Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetry and the National Landscape (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1990).
- 2.
Excursion, pp. 35–314 (p. 64). The various different texts of ‘The Ruined Cottage’ are presented in Butler’s (1979) edition, to which I refer below.
- 3.
The opening line of Clare’s ‘Waterloo’, its celebratory and patriotic tone very unlike the poems in this chapter, rallies contemporary poets to action, including ‘Ye tip-top Southeys’. See Early Poems, I, pp. 208‒211 (p. 208). Clare’s poem appears to date from 1815.
- 4.
Wordsworth’s ‘The Ruined Cottage’ has a complicated publication history and exists in different versions. For details, see ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘The Pedlar’ (ed. by James Butler, 1979), pp. ix–35. A reading text of the MS.B version is given in Butler, pp. 41‒77. Southey’s work, one of his English Eclogues, is contained in The Minor Poems of Robert Southey, 3 vols (London: Longman, 1823), II, pp. 178–184.
- 5.
Early Poems, I, pp. 171‒172 (p. 171).
- 6.
See lines 520–521 of the poem (Butler), p. 75.
- 7.
Averill, Poetry of Human Suffering, p. 125.
- 8.
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. by Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 80.
- 9.
Bloom, Western Canon, p. 244. The classic example of this New Historicist ire is Alan Liu’s monumental reading of the poem in Wordsworth: The Sense of History, pp. 311–359.
- 10.
See The Complete Poems and Prose of William Blake, ed. by David Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1962, rev. ed. 1988), pp. 171–173. All further references to Blake’s poetry are from this edition.
- 11.
Steven Gores, Psychosocial Spaces: Verbal and Visual Readings of British Culture: 1750–1820 (Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2000), p. 98.
- 12.
Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 262, 271.
- 13.
See Averill, Poetry of Human Suffering, pp. 21–55.
- 14.
England’s Ruins, pp. 92–145 (p. 109).
- 15.
Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ is a lyric poem, but it does not treat the physical fact of the ruin.
- 16.
England’s Ruins, p. 92. Janowitz lists ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’ as another relevant poem here.
- 17.
Janowitz, England’s Ruins, p. 22.
- 18.
This is from MS.D. of Wordsworth’s poem. See Butler, p. 61.
- 19.
For a more detailed explanation of this process in Wordsworth’s poetry, see Kurt Fosso’s Buried Communities: Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004).
- 20.
See, as a famous example, William Gilpin’s formulation, where the ‘picturesque eye […] examines parts, but never descends to particles’ [original emphasis], in Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; And On Sketching Landscape (London: R. Blamire, 1792), p. 26.
- 21.
Poems Descriptive, p. 191. For more research in this area, with a chapter on Clare, see Sarah Houghton-Walker’s Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 92‒126.
- 22.
Janowitz notes that the detail of the ‘water-jar’, found in each of the poems by Clare, Wordsworth, and Southey discussed in this chapter, is ‘derived from Ecclesiastes’. See England’s Ruins, p. 121.
- 23.
The quote is from ‘The Ruined Cottage’. See Butler, p. 48.
- 24.
Malcolm Andrews cites lines from Goldsmith’s The Traveller as an example of the former type of response to ruins in the eighteenth century. See Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape, Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760‒1800 (London: Scolar Press, 1990), p. 60.
- 25.
The closest comparison here to Clare’s ‘Grief searching muse give oer’ is the line ‘Ill could the muse indignant grief forbear’ (37) of John Langhorne’s ‘Written Amongst the Ruins of Pontefract Castle’, which dates from 1756. Langhorne is concerned with the historical conflict of the Wars of the Roses, which puts his poem at a remove from Clare’s. See The Poetical Works of John Langhorne, I (London: T. Becket and P.A. De Hondt, 1766), p. 157.
- 26.
Writing of the Disaster, p. 47.
- 27.
Thirteen-Book Prelude, p. 127.
- 28.
Poems of the Middle Period, II, pp. 35–40 (p. 35).
- 29.
Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems, ed. by Elizabeth Story Donno (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 75–99.
- 30.
Country and the City, p. 125.
- 31.
White, ‘Clare: “Man of Taste”’, pp. 38–54.
- 32.
Timothy Brownlow, John Clare and Picturesque Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 60–61.
- 33.
Georg Simmel, ‘The Ruin’, in Georg Simmel, 1858–1918: A Collection of Essays with Translations and a Bibliography, ed. by Kurt H. Wolff (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1959), pp. 259–266 (pp. 261–262).
- 34.
Michael Roth, with Claire Lyons and Charles Merewether, Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 1997), p. 25.
- 35.
See Poems of the Middle Period, IV, p. 292.
- 36.
John Dyer, The Ruins of Rome (London: J. Dodsley, 1761), pp. 44, 102.
- 37.
Rural Muse, pp. 47–50 (pp. 47, 49, 48).
- 38.
Village Minstrel, I, pp. 119‒125 (pp. 124‒125).
- 39.
Shepherd’s Calendar, p. 61. This is from ‘July’. The type of ‘castles’ that Saxons built is not clear from Clare’s poem.
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White, A. (2017). Rural Ruins: Clare, Wordsworth, and Southey. In: John Clare's Romanticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53859-4_6
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