John Clare’s Spiritual Ethics

One of the qualities I love about John Clare’s poetry is its presentness. His poems are, I believe, partly instructions on how to live one’s life. A big part of that is being in the here-and-now. As the late Zen master, writer, and activist Thich Nhat Hanh said, “Spiritual practice is not just sitting and meditating. Practice is looking, thinking, touching, drinking, eating, and talking.” Clare’s poetry is tremendously spiritual in that sense, and that spirituality is deeply ethical. 

A good example of this is his poem “Birds’ Nests.” The poem opens with “How fresh the air, the birds how busy now” (99). What a beautiful line. I can feel the freshness of the air, and I can hear those birds rustling and flitting and chirp-chirp-chirping (although it helps that I’m familiar with the areas Clare lived in). Clare has the reader right there with him. The poem is alive from the first line, and that aliveness continues in the next lines: “In every walk if I but peep I find / Nests newly made or finished all and lined / With hair and thistledown and in the bough / Of little hawthorn huddled up in green” (99). In every walk, he says—not just some—he only needs to peep into the shrubbery to find it teeming with life. The reader is there with him, bending and kneeling, encountering the wildlife, seeing the materials the birds used to make their nests. 

In fact, the poem itself has a nest-like quality in its overall lack of punctuation—the words lead into and almost wrap around each other, much like twigs—and in its uneven line lengths, which are products of his use of iambic pentameter. The poem, like its “linnet’s of materials,” is also “loose and rough” (99). 

Clare takes us to the bottom of the hedge in the tenth line. We see “weaves of homely stuff / Dead grass and mosses green, an hermitage / For secresy and shelter rightly made” (99). It’s a world within a world, and, through our presentness, we are lucky enough to see it. The eleventh line ends with “hermitage,” which calls attention to the spiritual quality of this experience. If you give your full attention to something in nature, Clare seems to suggest, you, too, can have a spiritual experience. 

But don’t think that this experience is simply meek—it is also deeply ethical. 

Clare was profoundly upset by humans ravaging the land for power and profit. Many of his poems “reflect the way enclosure and changes in land use have stripped away vegetation . . .” (Goodridge 111). Moreover, “[t]hanks to developments in ecological thinking, his modern readers may be particularly alert to the idea of the ground as a living thing, capable of being wounded by human overexploitation and failure to live in balance and harmony with nature” (Goodridge 121). Indeed, we can, according to E. P. Thompson, call Clare a “‘poet of ecological protest: he was not writing about man here and nature there, but lamenting a threatened equilibrium in which both were involved’” (Bate 50). 

Do not look away, Clare seems to say, from all the life we are harming. Give your full attention. The Industrial Revolution began before Clare’s birth, which was on July 13, 1793, and so he reminds us about how our actions can disrupt fragile ecosystems. Often, in our industrialized societies, many of us live our lives on autopilot, with our minds on sheer survival under capitalism. But what do we miss in the process as our cars and mass transportation pollute the environment? We miss our collective destruction of the planet: 

In species after species, climate change is creating pressures that are depriving life-forms of their most essential survival tool: the ability to create new life and carry on their genetic lines. Instead, the spark of life is being extinguished, snuffed out in its earliest, most fragile days: in the egg, in the embryo, in the nest, in the den. (Klein 434)  

Birds. Fish. Sea turtles. Coral reefs. Polar bears. Penguins. Seals. Wolverines. Butterflies. Bees. Soil. Ourselves. The list of who or what’s being harmed by global warming, or, as Daniel Wildcat calls it—which I prefer—“global burning,” could go on and on.

To be present is not only a spiritual act—the seemingly simple act of peeping into shrubbery with your full attention is also an ethical one.

—Iain Grinbergs

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Works Cited

Bate, Jonathan. John Clare: A Biography. Picador, 2003. 

Goodridge, John. John Clare and Community. Cambridge UP, 2013. 

Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. Simon & Schuster, 2014. 

Nhat Hanh, Thich. “This Moment is Perfect.” Lion’s Roar, 2021, https://www.lionsroar.com/the-moment-is-perfect/

Summerfield, Geoffrey, ed. John Clare: Selected Poems. Penguin, 1990.