Today’s Poem: All Nature Has a Feeling

John Clare’s hymn to Wordsworth

John Constable, View of Dedham Vale from East Bergholt, 1815 (Wikimedia Commons)

The life of the English poet John Clare (1793–1864) overlapped significantly with the careers of both Wordsworth and Tennyson, and with both Romanticism and Victorianism — to neither of which did Clare precisely belong, not least because he was a working man. The son of a Northamptonshire farm laborer, Clare himself worked on the land. Through his own toil, he nurtured in himself a deep affinity for the soil and what grew in it, and for the traditional society that had long coexisted with the countryside.

He felt the developments of the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions — the draining of the fens, for example, which had defined an entire way of life in East Anglia — as a personal shock. Sensitive and eccentric to the point of incarceration in a mental asylum (the listed cause of insanity was “years of poetical prosings”), and influenced by the nature mysticism of the Romantics, he remained nevertheless a straightforwardly devout Anglican, conservative in all his outlooks. 

William Hilton’s portrait of John Clare (Wikimedia Commons)

Clare’s poem “A Look at the Heavens,” for example, echoes Psalm 19 in asserting that the heavens are telling the glory of God. But Today’s Poem, written in 1845,  five years before Wordsworth’s death, channels the pure Romanticism of the early Wordsworth. Clare had in fact dedicated an admiring sonnet to Wordsworth, in which the senior poet’s poems, like the wildflowers of the field, are of value only to those who bother to stoop and see them. “What critics throw away, I love the more,” he wrote. “Merit will live, though parties disagree!”

“All Nature Has a Feeling,” too, is a hymn to Wordsworth in the same way that “A Look at the Heavens” is a hymn to God. Here, in contrast with “A Look at the Heavens,” nature is not so much sacramental as sentient. The natural world of this poem embodies a hope grounded in its own materiality, infused with its own sufficient spirit. Its here and now eternity is changeless in its changes. This is the sort of faith that the 1798 Wordsworth, of “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” would have professed — though by comparison, what’s striking in Clare’s poem is the utter absence of self.

In its brief nine iambic-pentameter lines, the poem reads like a truncated sonnet, with a cyclical rhyme scheme — ababbcbcc — that carries the end-sound of its first line almost to the close of the poem, where the c-rhymed couplet knits up the conclusion into the body of the poem, rather than tying it off with a new rhyme as a Shakespearean sonnet would do. The form, like the subject, expresses a sense of unity: all things integrated into oneness by this “feeling” that pervades them. “In silence,” but with one voice, “they / Speak happiness.” 

---

All Nature Has a Feeling

by John Clare

All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks
Are life eternal: and in silence they
Speak happiness beyond the reach of books;
There’s nothing mortal in them; their decay
Is the green life of change; to pass away
And come again in blooms revivified.
Its birth was heaven, eternal is its stay,
And with the sun and moon shall still abide
Beneath their day and night and heaven wide.

---