클레어의 평범한 새와 로맨티시즘 새

Abstract

In his poems about birds and their nests, John Clare separates himself from other Romantic authors in terms of his embodied knowledge of local habitat, reverence for nonhuman beings, down-to-earth approach to living conditions, affective engagement with the natural world, and care-ful concern with humble creatures. Clare’s bird poems offer insight into the commonality of beings in the natural world, the coexistence of humans and nonhumans, and the sheer materiality of nature defying conceptual domestication. The notion of “common” characterizes birds’ style of living and Clare’s attunement to them. Contrary to conventional Romantic birds, which enjoy a privileged state of being as guiding spirits to human life, Clare’s birds are common in the sense that they’re humble creatures living, breeding, and dying in the local environment. Clare provides an embodied knowledge of them attained through his daily experience. He also adopts a loose yet emphatic common language. The birds Clare describes, such as the skylark, pewit, yellowhammer, snipe, and landrail, are living entities participating in the local environment with Clare himself but are still unknowable to him; they have their own singularities and dignity. Clare accepts this sympathetically and delivers his disposition consistently towards a life of coexistence.