Today’s Poem: Nightwind

Night’s black depths in danger’s garb arrayed

Károly Kisfaludy, Storm at Night, c. 1820 (Wikimedia Commons)

---

Nightwind

by John Clare

Darkness like midnight from the sobbing woods 
Clamours with dismal tidings of the rain, 
Roaring as rivers breaking loose in floods 
To spread and foam and deluge all the plain. 
The cotter listens at his door again, 
Half doubting whether it be floods or wind, 
And through the thickening darkness looks afraid, 
Thinking of roads that travel has to find 
Through night’s black depths in danger’s garb arrayed. 
And the loud glabber round the flaze soon stops 
When hushed to silence by the lifted hand 
Of fearing dame who hears the noise in dread 
And thinks a deluge comes to drown the land; 
Nor dares she go to bed until the tempest drops. 
═══════════════════════

John Clare (1793–1864) was in may ways a poetic outlier, positioned chronologically between Romanticism and the various eccentricities of the Victorian era — none of which, for multiple reasons, were precisely Clare’s eccentricities. Ultimately he was the sole occupant of his peculiar sphere. His poetic range encompassed hymns to pure Wordsworthian Romanticism and apocalyptic visions of beauty and terror. He was capable, too, of a level of artistic restraint rendered all the more remarkable by the difficult emotional circumstances under which many of his poems were composed. To speak of his “peculiar sphere” is not to dwell on his emotionally fragile strangeness, but to emphasize — so I hope — his singularity as a poet.

Like “Autumn,” his searing account of a season associated, in his imagination, with an experience of trauma, Today’s Poem again envisions upheaval in the natural world as a biblical cataclysm. To the sensitive Clare, a storm at night would have been an exercise in sensory overwhelm, felt not only by him but by the entire natural world, its feelings in concert with his own. The woods would seem to be “sobbing,” the rain to bring bad tidings of things to come. Twice the poem uses the word “deluge,” calling to mind the obliterating flood of Genesis. In the moment, the storm’s human observers — the cotter, the “fearing dame,” and the speaker himself — half-persuade themselves that God might forget his promise to Noah.

William Hilton, John Clare, 1820 (Wikimedia Commons)

In this sonnet-length pentameter stanza, many lines begin with the hammer-stroke of a trochee, as though to echo a burst of wind or the lashings of the rain. The rhyme scheme, ababbcdcdefdfe, initially suggests a Shakespearean sonnet but begins to deviate from that expected pattern by line 5 — or else, if the template is the Spenserian sonnet, by the third line of the second quatrain. Either way, this deviation reinforces the poem’s sense that although the Christian might expect to find comfort in that promise following the great deluge in Genesis, even in the light of that promise, reality and our perceptions of it do not proceed in any straightforward or predictable way.

The strangest moment occurs at line ten — where, in the chaos of the storm, and in possibly the closest thing to a volta in this poem, the language itself turns strange. The poem shifts its gaze from the scene outside to the interior of the cottage, from whose doorway the cotter has been peering out. Though “glabber” is a Scots word for liquefied mud, we seem to be, now, huddled around a fire, with “flaze” apparently signifying gazing at the fire — the people talking until a frightened woman hushes them to listen to the storm’s ferocity. Only when the wind has blown itself out, and the end of the world hasn’t happened, can anyone go to bed.

---

---