The Lost Romantics by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030355463
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

‘I love’, the words Clare had earlier so often called upon as the way into a sonnet, make delayed entry to reiterate his affection for the maple, the leafy ‘clothing’ it sustains, and for the times and places it is encountered. In both the Spenserian stanza and the sonnet, Clare displays a formal intelligence and suppleness invigorated by contact with experience. The form is freshened by feeling. But any potential challenge to the artifice and verbalism of Victorian poetry is dimmed by the absence of any cumulative agenda uniting the artistic discoveries; one longs for evidence of Clare’s sense of poetic mission beyond the individual poem. His endeavours are isolated from the debates and poetic climate of the age.

The visual power of the ending of ‘The Maple Tree ’ depends upon the transfigurative force of Clare’s verb ‘gemm’d’. The late poems often give the sense that Clare takes figurative language literally: the yellowhammer that flies in with ‘head of solid gold’ at the end of the sonnet on that bird (Later Poems, ‘The Yellowhammer’, l. 14) is another deftly arresting instance. The impression is of a poet seeing nature as though it had the permanence of art. Robinson and Summerfield put it boldly: ‘there is a resemblance to Van Gogh, and the same assurance in an idiom peculiar to himself’.14 Often a visionary extravagance flashes within unremarkable structures, as in ‘Autumn’ (Later Poems, ‘The thistle down’s flying’), whose comparisons swing from the oddly domestic—‘The ground parched and cracked is Like over baked bread’ (l. 5)—to the unsettlingly otherworldly: ‘Burning hot is the ground Liquid gold is the air / Who ever looks round Sees Eternity there’ (ll. 11–12). But Clare is at his most responsive to a state of mind in which glimpses of ‘Eternity’ open out of the everyday when he finds a form that enables him to contemplate, rather than simply convey, this intensity. The prose poem beginning ‘The drew drops on every blade of grass’ attunes its rhythms to rippling counterflows of loss and wonder as visionary and more mundane apprehensions of nature overlap; the formal imagination at work again shows Clare’s sympathy with burgeoning nineteenth-century modes. ‘The dew drops on every blade of grass are so much like silver drops that I am obliged to stoop down as I walk to see if they are pearls’,15 Clare begins, his idiom accommodating a super-tuned particularity of vision (who can see ‘every blade of grass’?) and an instinct for how language guides our apprehension: to say that the ‘dew drops’ are like ‘silver drops’ shapes as though to apply a simile, but in fact just reinforces the physical characteristics of the drops; a combination of intensification and disappointment is underpinned by the repetition (the ‘drops’ are like… ‘drops’) and the image hovers halfway between the literal and the figurative before the more explicit comparison with ‘pearls’. Throughout the passage, Clare’s repetitions answer a recurrent and flawed effort to make the transient permanent: The drops are ‘so like gold

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