John Clare - The Mouse's Nest, published 1935 ... - Hellesdon.org

John Clare - The Mouse's Nest, published 1935 (written 1832-7)
You may remember Clare’s Sonnet from the AQA Anthology, and here is another one:
naïve poetry, deceptively simple, in rhyming couplets.
A simple respectful description, it seems, of the lowliest of nature except, perhaps, for the
words "odd" and "grotesque". A contrast to the sometimes pompous, self-conscious,
theorizing abstractions of other romantic poets.
Keats observed of Clare's early poetry that "description too much prevailed over
sentiment".
Clare replied of Keats: "...it is the case with other inhabitants of great citys he often
described nature as she appeared to his fancys and not as he would have described had he
witnessed the things he describes...what appear as beautys in the eyes of a pent up citizen
are looked upon as conceits by those who live in the country."
Clare is witness to the experienced details of landscape and its changes.
[BBC]
[Mouse’s Nest, the commonplace selection from a week ago] exemplifies what it is in
[Clare] that I find endlessly fascinating. Here is Clare on his rounds again, telling us what
he has just seen but neglecting to mention why he thinks it ought to interest us or even
him. Though it has been likened to Burns, there is no suggestion implicit or otherwise
that the sight of this “wee, sleekit, cowrin’, tim’rous beastie” has stirred Clare to
reflections on his own unsatisfactory condition or that of mankind in general; there is not
even a sign that Clare’s mouse is cowrin’ and tim’rous. Clare just happened by; before he
recognized the creature as a mouse, he thought she looked odd and grotesque.
Subsequently he saw no reason to revise his estimate and even less to humanize or
allegorize her. Instead, after noting that she found her nest again, his attention turns, as
the poem is signing off, to the undistinguished landscape. The water is having difficulty
making its way over the pebbles. It must be a dry summer. The only hint of grandeur in
the closure is the appearance of the cesspools – broad, old, glittering, they have their
dignity under the sun, even though most travelers would hurriedly pass them by with
pinched noses. And the poem is done. Clare was here – he saw what there was to see and
noted it down, then went about the business of idle observation, ready to collect further
swatches of nature as casually as one might pick a wildflower, press it between the pages
of a book, and forget it.
[Geoff Klock]
This looking around can find its reward in unexpected places–perhaps in the street as we
walk; perhaps in a book that we are reading; perhaps in our reverie or dreams. We poke
about. In the language of the English poet John Clare, we “prog.” His untitled poem set
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after haying time, now called “The Mouse’s Nest,” written sometime between 1832 and
1837, portrays a moment of looking for nothing in particular, but looking, while
wandering through the already mown fields, and finding something:
I found a ball of grass among the hay
And progged it as I passed and went away [progged = prodded]
And when I looked I fancied something stirred
And turned agen and hoped to catch the bird
When out an old mouse bolted in the wheat
With all her young ones hanging at her teats[.]
She looked so odd and so grotesque to me
I ran and wondered what the thing could be
And pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood[.]
When the mouse hurried from the crawling brood
The young ones squeaked[,] and when I went away
She found her nest again among the hay[.]
The water oer the pebbles scarce could run
And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun
[According to the OED, “craking” would mean making a harsh cry; some editors have
“squeaking” and others “crawling”; Again, the OED says that cesspools = a dug pit for
catching sediment for a stream, or refuse from waste water.[
He does not analyze what he finds, but follows his feeling into a new moment. His feeling
does not need any comment. Whereas most of the time, as Dickinson writes, “‘Tis many
a tiny Mill / Turns unperceived beneath our feet” (Johnson 1097; Franklin 1102), Clare’s
tiny mouse has unfettered the whole world, in his spirit.
Reading Clare’s poem, which was written amidst the drastic social change and suffering
caused by the private appropriation of public lands and the resulting displacement and
impoverishment of poor laborers, I cannot help feeling that in the utter otherness of the
mouse, he saw himself. Like the mouse, he had many children to support by his physical
labor, since he could not do so by his verses. And perhaps he felt he himself was
considered “odd and grotesque.” Certainly he was pained in his awareness of being
different from those among whom he lived–Clare was unlike other farm laborers in being
a poet, and in being a farm laborer, he was very unlike other poets. Of all the little things
he sees while meandering through the field in a thoughtful mood, it is the peculiar
overburdened mouse which in some way he in particular is predisposed to notice.
Noticing it–merely seeing it–he has accomplished the work that his imagination was ready
to do, and this accomplishment makes him feel exalted. The world appears to him in a
different way. He has been given, or rather he has given himself, an intensely awake
moment simply because the vague and unconscious availability of his feeling, of his mind,
has found that which it was available for–the symbol of his feeling, rather than the
analysis of it or the naming of it.
Since we writers begin in aftermath, we might look carefully over the mown field for
whatever we may happen to notice, and we might listen for any echo of what was said
when the field was filled with men and women and children laboring. We will see
something, and hear something, even if what is there is mostly nothing and silence. We
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listen for what others heard, and also for what was not heard by anyone–what we
ourselves did not hear, or once heard and then could no longer hear until in the
aftermath we listened once more. And when suddenly we see our own mouse, and
perceive it fully, we are taken by a feeling of exaltation because we gain access to another
world inside the world. Even muddy rain puddles then glitter in the sun. Clare’s
responsiveness to what he sees, this seeing of that to which he is responsive, this
acknowledging of his own response, is who Clare is; and in finishing the poem, he has
brought himself into the truth of his being.
[Reginald Gibbons]
John Clare was born at Helpstone, Northamptonshire in 1793, his father a farm-labourer
and his mother the daughter of a local shepherd. He was therefore deep-rooted in a place
and in a class by his parents, and was also affected by their 'trash of Ballad Singing . . . my
first feelings and attempts at poetry were imitations of my father's songs . . .' He worked
as a labourer, continually composing poems and in 1820 a selection of these was
published by John Taylor (Keats's publisher), which had a great and fashionable success.
Fashion changed, Clare continued to write, but further volumes failed. Disappointed,
horrified by the cruel changes (enclosures) of the world he knew and loved, in 1837 he
mentally broke down and was taken into a kindly private asylum in Epping Forest. Four
years later he walked home from the place, eighty miles in three and a half days,
subsisting on roadside grass. Later that year, 1841, he was certified insane and confined,
again with much understanding, in the Northampton Asylum, where he remained,
continuing to write, for twenty-three years until his death.
He composed ballads, long narratives in verse, philosophical poems, 'imitations' of other
poets,and in this selection an attempt is made to suggest that variety: his genius lay in his
quick observation of the people and places and creatures (especially birds) he saw around
him. Edmund Blunden remarked on Clare's 'elemental terseness' and likened it to the
nature-engravings of Bewick. Clare knew that accurate description is like turning down a
page in a book to mark a favourite passage (which may be a bad habit but Coleridge used
the butter-knife): 'How many pages of sweet nature's book/Has poetry doubled down as
favourite things . . .' and thereby fixed the transient. His genius was for detail. His
milkmaid turns her buckets upside down so that she and Clare can sit, then she milks her
'breathing' cows - we see their steaming breath.
His 'elemental terseness' can end a poem about a mouse's nest, suddenly, 'The water o'er
the pebbles scarce could run/And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun.' After the
close-up the long-shot, placing the mouse (and Clare) in their world and season.
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[P. J. Kavanagh]
Clare’s stubbornness in his adherence to the many registers of this
single principle, the ethical refusal to exploit the objects of nature,
whether by physical or aesthetic means, cut him off from the production
of true poetic genius according to the dominant aesthetic theories of
the day. But that is not to say that his poetic practice did not constitute
an aesthetic position. He believed in a different poetic truth, in a strict
adherence to truthfulness in the representation of nature and human
activity in nature. Even when the poet entered the poem as a human
figure, potentially the poem’s subject, Clare refused to redirect meaning
into the poetic self. This resistance to recuperation is clear enough in
another sonnet of around 1835, ‘The Mouse’s Nest’:
I found a ball of grass among the hay
And progged it as I passed and went away;
And when I looked I fancied something stirred,
And turned again and hoped to catch the bird—
When out an old mouse bolted in the wheats
With all her young ones hanging at her teats;
She looked so odd and so grotesque to me,
I ran and wondered what the thing could be,
And pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood;
Then the mouse hurried from the craking brood.
The young ones squeaked, and as I went away
She found her nest again among the hay.
The water o’er the pebbles scarce could run
And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun.
The human figure in the poem gives us no clue about what this event
might mean. We witness an instinctual response (the poet’s running)
to an inexplicable sight. We cannot even guess at the cause of this
response, much less construct a moral out of it. If this were an incident
from ‘The Prelude’, the poet would meditate on the event and
eventually secure its meaning, and the apparent panic attack would be
superseded as a necessary negative stage in the growth of the poet’s
mind. This final meaning would be at the expense of the quality of
the moment, and Clare strives to preserve the truthfulness of that
visceral moment’s inexplicability. The final couplet is a logical non
sequitur; the glittering cesspool bears no relation to the mouse, yet it
rings true as the next moment in Clare’s intense perception and scrupulously
accurate representation of the world he viewed. In creating
these intensely perceptual poems, Clare is unique as a sonnet writer.
Rather than developing an argument through the length of an octave
and sestet or three quatrains and a couplet, Clare creates a series of vivid perceptual
moments of an almost cinematic quality. The matter of the poems is not formal, and thus
the sonnet becomes merely the unit of perception.
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[From www.palgrave.com]
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