This essay examines the representation of listening in a number of Clare's 1832 poems, paying attention to the language used, including prepositions, ideophones, verb forms, dialect and literary allusion. It considers how listening locates and is located in his poems and argues that in ‘The Fernowls Nest’ literary allusion is an especially appropriate language for describing the poem's strangely displaced sounds. It proposes that Clare's listening is alert and responsive to different aural perspectives, that it is compound and reflexive, and especially attuned to moments of aural ambiguity, when the boundary between self and other, subject and object becomes blurred. Such moments offer a mode of ethical relation to the natural world that resists the politics of representation John Barrell has associated with the eye in loco-descriptive poetry. 1 If the particularity and multiplicity of Clare's poems offer an alternative to the visual mode of control and possession associated with the prospect view, the distinctive forms of listening we find in his poems, and, in particular, his attunement to aural ambiguity, represent another kind of resistance to the aesthetic expression of human ownership and control over the natural world. Listening in Clare is thus a form of environmentalist poetics.
John Clare, William Cowper and the eighteenth century