Communications about nature vary in their intent – an ecological warning, a report of scientific interest, or a sharing of delight – and they vary in the way the communication is worded – scientific jargon, everyday parlance, or in a style that is poetic. In this article we are going to explore poetic writing and speaking about nature; particularly the type than seeks to share delight. After some general words about poetic communication, I want to look at this subject through the verse of the person who is perhaps Britain’s finest nature poet – John Clare.
Before focusing on the poetry of John Clare, let’s put poetic communications about nature in context. Facebook might seem an odd place to start, but there are lots of nature-related Facebook pages, and they contain a large variety of ways that people communicate about nature. Some people just communicate plain facts. Below a picture taken of a Woodlark, a person writes: “Woodlark, Lullula arborea, Westleton Common, grid ref TM 442681, 04.06.2024’. Another person might choose to write something that communicates their feelings and their sense of joy: “I had the most wonderful experience on Westleton Common today. A Woodlark rose to the sky in front of me and sang its fluty, joyous song. What better way to rid you of your everyday cares than to bask in such a heavenly sound.” Here, the writer is communicating something more than facts. They are communicating their feelings, they are addressing how you might feel, and they are trying to use words in a way that communicates something more than the sharing of factual information. We are moving into the realms of poetry here.
Woodlark in flight
Defining what constitutes poetry may go against the grain of poetry itself. However, I would say that an important constitutive element of poetry is that it evokes an imaginative and affective awareness of experience. Poetic words don’t just tell you where a Woodlark is to be found, they help you imagine the beauty of the Woodlark’s song and try to capture how it might make you feel. Though it can do more, nature poetry – through its use of a particular style and sound of language – should stimulate an emotional response to the natural world.
John Clare was born in the Northamptonshire village of Helpston. He belonged to the labouring class and wrote his poetry in the early 19th Century. He became known as the ‘peasant poet’. He wrote about a range of things, including his youthful loves, but his main subject was landscape and nature.
Portrait of John Clare
In the opening lines of his poem, ‘All Nature Has A Feeling’, he writes:
All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks Are life eternal; and in silence they Speak happiness beyond the reach of books;
Putting aside the irony that Clare is writing his words in ‘books’, he is insisting that appreciating nature is about feelings – indeed, nature itself ‘has a feeling’. These feelings can’t be definitively described in words (they are ‘silent’ and ‘beyond the reach of books’), but poetic work can evoke personal and shared imaginative feelings about nature.
Clare is a poetic communicator about nature. He wants you to share his delight and awe of discovering nature. See how, in the opening to his poem ‘The Nightingale’s Nest’, he’s inviting you along to share nature with him:
Up this green woodland ride let’s softly rove And list the nightingale – she dwelleth here. Hush! let the wood gate softly clap – for fear The noise might drive her from her home of love;
Clare’s nature poems are rooted in his direct experience of nature in the fields, woods and hedgerows of his Northamptonshire village. Not for him the high abstract pastoralism of wandering “lonely as a cloud, that floats on high o’er vales and hills”. In this same poem about the Nightingale’s nest, he is able to include lines, grounded in his experience, describing how you and he might find the nest:
Her curious house is hidden - part aside These hazel branches in a gentle way And stoop right cautious ’neath the rustling boughs; For we will have another search today And hunt this fern-strown thorn-clump round and round, And where this seeded woodgrass idly bow We’ll wade right through; it is a likely nook. In such-like spots and often on the ground They’ll build where rude boys never think to look. Aye, as I live, her secret nest is here,
And, don’t fear, Clare respects nature far too much not to urge withdrawing from the place of the nest, lest the Nightingale should become too disturbed: “We’ll leave it as we found it ….. We will not plunder music of its dower, not turn this spot of happiness to thrall”.
The Nightingale’s nest
Clare has a respect for nature and he wants to share his knowledge and feelings for nature with you, but he is aware that ordinary, descriptive words (or paintings, or photographs) will ultimately fail to comprehensively communicate the essence of nature. In this extract from Clare’s poem ‘Wood Pictures in Spring’, we see how Clare acknowledges that words and drawings can never fully capture the beauty of nature:
The rich brown-umber hue the oaks unfold When spring’s young sunshine bathes their trucks gold, So rich, so beautiful, so past the power Of words to paint …. Yet paint itself with living nature fails: The sunshine threading through these broken rails In mellow shades no pencil e’er conveys, And mind alone feels fancies and portrays
Let’s leave Clare by looking at another of his poems – ‘Emmonsails’s Heath in Winter’. The poem – which contains a series of images of birds in a winter landscape – begins with the words “I love ….”. It is surely meant to evoke feelings in the reader. Clare wants you to love this winter scene, as he does, not to wallow in winter’s apparent ‘bleakness’. It is worth noticing that this poem is about nature itself. Clare resists using nature as a symbol for something else. Clare might write about, say, the beauty of a Dog Rose in the hedgerow, but he is most unlikely to write “my love is like a red, red rose”.
I love to see the old heath's withered brake Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling, While the old heron from the lonely lake Starts slow and flaps his melancholy wing, And oddling crow in idle motions swing On the half rotten ashtree's topmost twig, Beside whose trunk the gipsy makes his bed. Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread, The fieldfares chatter in the whistling thorn And for the awe round fields and closen rove, And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain And hang on little twigs and start again.
A ‘Bumbarrel’ aka Long-tailed Tit
Despite the elusiveness of capturing the essence of nature in words, Clare chooses a path that he hopes will help him get somewhere close – poetry. And he succeeds, perhaps better than any other poet, in evoking feelings for nature that stir emotions, prompt contemplations and make us wonder just that bit more.
In these modern days, when nature is under threat, is nature poetry a mere indulgence? Shouldn’t we be spending our time calculating and describing the importance of nature to our continued inhabitance of planet Earth? Shouldn’t we be busy constructing models and spreadsheets which reveal the economic value that nature provides? Well, perhaps we should be doing these things, but not to the exclusion of evoking the wonder of nature and revealing how the quality of our lives would be the poorer should we be robbed of that feeling for nature. Where do delight, wonder and awe fit in these economic and self-oriented calculations? With this question stated, I leave you with the words of Michael McCarthy, from his book ‘The Moth Snowstorm’:
“The natural world can offer us more than the means to survive, on the one hand, or mortal risk to be avoided, on the other: it can offer us joy”
Rather than reading extracts from John Clare’s poems, you can indulge yourself in reading them in full: Bate, J. (ed), John Clare – Selected Poems, Faber & Faber (2004). To learn more about John Clare’s life, read Bate, J., John Clare – A Biography, Picador (2003).
