‘As now I gaze’: Forms of Visual Experience in Clare’s Sonnets

White, Adam

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-53859-4_5

‘As now I gaze’: Forms of Visual Experience in Clare’s Sonnets

Adam White²

Chapter
First Online: 28 May 2017

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Abstract

Clare’s ceaseless experimentation with the sonnet identifies him as a major Romantic exponent of this 14-line lyric form. This chapter analyses Clare’s use of the sonnet to dramatise acts of seeing, looking and gazing at a variety of natural and man-made ‘old’ forms and objects in a rural scene, ranging from trees to ruined abbeys and castles. In his sense of the sublime duration of old, individual forms, Clare compares with Wordsworth. Contrary to the critical orthodoxy, moreover, Clare’s use of the lyric is experiential as well as denotative and descriptive. Elsewhere Clare is preoccupied with the sublime in the context of the destructive powers of time, but in his sonnets, as this chapter demonstrates, his emphasis is on the survival of ‘old’ things as sublime.

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Notes

1.
See, for instance, Kuduk Weiner, Clare’s Lyric, pp. 50–86.
2.
One of Clare’s favourite poetic phrases is ‘I love to see’. Examples include ‘I love to see the old heaths withered brake’ (‘Emmonsails Heath in Winter’), in Poems of the Middle Period, IV, p. 286; and ‘I love to see the summer beaming forth’, in Later Poems, II, p. 1024.
3.
Lodge, ‘Contested Bounds’, p. 533.
4.
‘Contested Bounds’, p. 545.
5.
Adam Potkay, ‘The British Romantic Sublime’, in The Sublime: from Antiquity to the Present, ed. by Timothy M. Costelloe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 203–217 (p. 204).
6.
Prose Works, II, pp. 349‒360 (p. 351).
7.
Theresa M. Kelley, Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 216, n. 38.
8.
Prose Works, II, p. 350.
9.
Prose Works, II, p. 351.
10.
Revisionary Aesthetics, p. 25.
11.
Prose Works, II, p. 357.
12.
Revisionary Aesthetics, p. 26.
13.
Rural Muse, p. 163.
14.
While my previous chapter made it clear that Wordsworth read Burke on the sublime, whether Clare knew Burke’s work or not is, as stated previously, less clear; but given Clare’s probable knowledge of the theorists of the picturesque and the contemporary debate on this other major aesthetic category, it would not be surprising if he was aware of Burke too. See Goodridge, Clare and Community, p. 217, n. 9.
15.
James H. Averill, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 99.
16.
Robert Duran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 4.
17.
A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival, ed. by Daniel Robinson and Paula R. Feldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 3, 4.
18.
‘Romanticism and Lyric’, in Lyric: Formations and Transformations (Thain), p. 38.
19.
Balfour, ‘Matter of Genre in the Romantic Sublime’ (Mahoney), p. 505.
20.
John Fuller, The Sonnet (London: Methuen & Co., 1972), p. 37.
21.
Lodge, ‘Contested Bounds’, p. 549.
22.
See Clare’s sonnets on Boston Church in Rural Muse, pp. 156–157.
23.
Bruce Haley, Living Forms: Romantics and the Monumental Figure (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), p. 101.
24.
Wagner, A Moment’s Monument, pp. 12, 14.
25.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques Alain Miller, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1986), sections 6, 7, 8, and 9.
26.
Letters, p. 288.
27.
Joseph Phelan, The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 39–40.
28.
Clare: Critical Heritage, pp. 120, 408.
29.
‘Obscurity’ suggests some affinity with Burke. See his Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, pp. 48–50.
30.
Village Minstrel, II, p. 165. Clare’s poem ‘The Village Minstrel’ contains the lines ‘To gaze on some old arch or fretting wall, / Where ivy scrambles up to stop the fall’; see Village Minstrel, I, p. 46.
31.
Prose Works, II, p. 357.
32.
Prose Works, II, p. 351.
33.
Clare also occasionally records visual blockage, as in his sonnet ‘In Hilly Wood’, where ‘not an eye can find a way to see’ (4). This sonnet, with its expression of ‘sweet’ (11) rural isolation and solitude, compares with the later sonnets discussed in this chapter, while it also echoes Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard’ in the line ‘Full many a flower too, wishing to be seen’ (9). For a lightly ‘modernised’ text of Clare’s poem, see A Poet’s Guide to Britain, ed. by Owen Sheers (London: Penguin 2010), p. 269.
34.
Clare’s sonnet dates from around 1832. See Poems of the Middle Period, IV, p. 256.
35.
Clare’s explicit reference to the powers of the ‘mind’ here and elsewhere calls into question the second claim made in H.J. Massingham’s statement that ‘Clare is a poet of the spirit […] and not of the mind’. Cited in Critical Heritage (Storey), p. 325.
36.
Wordsworth’s emphasis on power is pronounced in his essay on ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful’. See Prose Works, II, p. 354.
37.
A Critical Study of Clare, p. 126.
38.
Rural Muse, p. 136.
39.
The Sublime, pp. 78, 83.
40.
See ‘To Obscurity (Written in a Fit of Despondency)’, in Early Poems, I, p. 386; ‘Obscurity’, in Poems of the Middle Period, IV, p. 256; ‘I Am’ (3‒4).
41.
William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (III.iii.147–148), ed. by Kenneth Palmer (London: Methuen, 1982, repr. 1991), p. 212.
42.
See Byron: Complete Poetical Works, II, p. 127.
43.
Harald Weinrich, Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting, trans. by S. Randall (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press [1997], 2004), p. 3.
44.
Philosophical Enquiry, p. 144; pp. 48‒51.
45.
Prose Works, II, p. 351.
46.
‘Matter of Genre in the Romantic Sublime’, p. 517.
47.
Clayton Crockett, A Theology of the Sublime (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 95.
48.
Vardy, Clare, Politics and Poetry, p. 34.
49.
Emily Brady, The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 92.
50.
The ‘gaze’ in Clare’s ‘The Primrose’ sonnet (12), in contrast, is momentary. See Poems Descriptive, p. 188.
51.
Rural Muse, pp. 136–137.
52.
See Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820–1845, pp. 612‒619 (p. 615); Thirteen-Book Prelude, p. 143.
53.
Paul Oppenheimer, The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self-Consciousness and the Invention of the Sonnet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
54.
Complete Poems, p. 247.
55.
William Galperin, The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 13. See also Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture: 1760‒1860 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p. 45.
56.
Return of the Visible, p. 287.
57.
As well as the allusions to Wordsworth in Clare’s writing that I pointed out earlier in this chapter, there is something of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ in Clare’s sonnet and its recognition of the passing of a ‘grandeur’ from the earth.
58.
See lines 34, 65‒71, and 85‒88 of ‘Antiquity’, in Shepherd’s Calendar, pp. 229‒233.
59.
Village Minstrel, I, p. 210.
60.
It is sonnet number ‘XVI’ in Rural Muse, p. 123. This seems to be the same version as the one printed in Poems of Clare, I (Tibble), p. 534.
61.
Ruins in British Romantic Art from Wilson to Turner, comm. by Haidee Jackson (Nottingham: Nottingham Castle Museum, 1988), pp. 24, 26. Clare’s sonnet to De Wint is in Rural Muse, p. 133.
62.
William Lisle Bowles, Sonnets and Other Poems (London: R Cruttwell, 5th edn, 1796), p. 30. I refer to the earlier (in terms of composition) of two sonnets by Wordsworth with this title. See Last Poems, 1821–1850 (ed. by Jared Curtis, 1999), p. 350.
63.
See also Wordsworth’s ‘Old Abbeys’, in Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, pp. 197‒198.
64.
Susan Evance, Poems (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), p. 5. See also A Century of Sonnets (ed. by Feldman and Robinson), pp. 134‒135.
65.
Stephen Gill reads Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘At Furness Abbey’ (‘A soothing spirit’ (3), 1845) as a celebration of the ‘healing power of Time and Nature’. There is a clear contrast with these concerns and those that are brought to life in Clare’s ‘Crowland Abbey’. See Gill, Wordsworth’s Revisitings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 3.
66.
Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, ed. by Chloe Chard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 15.
67.
See By Himself, p. 76.
68.
Strickland, ‘Clare and the Sublime’, p. 143. Strickland’s view that ‘Crowland Abbey’ is a piece of ‘uninspired imitation of inherited sensibility’ ignores the fact that the poem does not have a strong enough focus on the emotions of an ‘I’ – of a personalised speaker – to safely qualify as ‘sensibility’ writing, or indeed as a sonnet of sensibility.
69.
This poem is dated 21 June 1845. See Last Poems, 1821–1850, p. 397.
70.
Clare uses the word ‘rubbish’ in an alternative version of the sonnet. See Poems of the Middle Period, IV, p. 172. ‘Rubbish’ is still indicative of Clare’s approach in the published version of ‘Crowland Abbey’, which mobilises the conventional aesthetic categories of the sublime and (to a lesser extent) the picturesque, but also moves beyond them to contemplate ‘human bones’ (13).
71.
Peter Spratley, ‘Wordsworth’s Sensibility Inheritance: The Evening Sonnets and the “Miscellaneous Sonnets”’, European Romantic Review, 20:1 (2009), 95‒115.
72.
See, for instance, Walter Scott, The Antiquary, ed. by Nicola J. Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, repr. 2009), pp. 159‒161; Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, ed. by Sheila Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981, repr. 1998), pp. 56‒59.
73.
Another Northborough sonnet beginning ‘The traveller journeying on the road alone’ is a good example here, evidencing a concern with a ‘fragment’ (10) of the past. Clare’s reference to ‘The man of feeling’ (7) is curious given the pared down, unsentimental language of this poem. See Northborough Sonnets, p. 75.
74.
By Himself, p. 197; Letters, p. 553. The ‘castle’ that Clare refers to may in fact have been a manor house. On this, see Heyes, ‘Clare and the Uses of Antiquity’, p. 17, fn. 2.
75.
See Poems of the Middle Period, IV, pp. 292‒293.
76.
See, in particular, lines 334‒340 of Book XI of the Thirteen-Book Prelude, pp. 302‒303.
77.
Imagination of the Reader, p. 20.
78.
Imagination of the Reader, p. 20.
79.
Poems Descriptive, pp. 65‒68; Early Poems, I, pp. 402‒404 (p. 403).
80.
Rose Macaulay, The Pleasure of Ruins (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953), p. 342.
81.
By Himself, p. 189.
82.
Gray and Collins: Poetical Works, pp. 33‒39 (p. 39).
83.
Rural Muse, p. 134.
84.
See ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’, in Complete Poems, pp. 165–166. This sonnet follows the Petrarchan form in its first eight lines, but the last six lines appear to embrace the Shakespearian model.
85.
Poet’s Guide to Britain (Shears), p. 259.
86.
Rural Muse, pp. 169–171 (p. 169).
87.
Poems of the Middle Period, V, p. 254. This text is from 1832–1837.
88.
Prose Works, II, pp. 357–358.
89.
Prose Works, II, p. 358.

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White, A. (2017). ‘As now I gaze’: Forms of Visual Experience in Clare’s Sonnets. In: John Clare's Romanticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53859-4_5

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53859-4_5
Published: 28 May 2017
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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