Introduction

1. A complex expression of loss and anger, John Clare's poem "The Fallen Elm" speaks to feelings of powerlessness in the face of unchecked economic greed. Parliamentary enclosure and the development of new, scientifically-based agricultural practices (like crop rotation) changed the face of the poet's native Helpston landscape. In an effort to boost agricultural efficiency and to increase profits, large landowners leveled hills, rechannelled streams, and put up fences, growing hedgerows, and putting common lands under the plow. While "The Fallen Elm" describes the hidden costs of the loss of a single tree, it also explores the misuse of the rhetoric of freedom towards the privatization of the common lands through parliamentary enclosure. What was really lost as the result of this dispossession? How can enclosure in Clare's time connect with the drive towards privatization (of water rights, of intellectual property, of genetic codes) in our own? How can the loss of a beloved landscape affect one's sense of local history? By exploring these connections, students can come to a more full understanding of the complexity of Clare's great protest poem.

2. There are two steps an instructor might take when introducing students to the sense of loss pervading the first section of "The Fallen Elm." Using Clare's poem as a touchstone, the instructor might lead students in an analysis of the intimate connections they form with very particular natural landmarks (trees climbed, caves explored), helping them to consider more generally the ramifications of this intimacy. Such an exploration will help students better understand Clare's unique sense of place, how the poet's understanding of "home" encompasses a nascent ecological point of view. An instructor might also explore the more overt political content of "The Fallen Elm," which includes a fierce condemnation of the rhetoric of freedom; this rhetoric seeks to legitimize the destruction of the natural world and the enslavement of the rural poor. Modern students of Clare's work coming from rural areas near large cities—areas transformed from farmland into sprawling suburban housing developments—are quick to make connections between the enclosure so vividly depicted in Clare's poems and the rapid "Californication" (to use an Edward Abbeyism) taking place in their own backyards. The descriptions of change brought about by the agricultural revolution in nineteenth-century England may speak to their own experiences, in which Walmart and large box retailers appear in the midst of cornfields, and rapid suburban development swallows up family-owned century farms.

   I. The Fallen Elm: The Loss of an Intimate Landmark

3. In recent years, much has been written about how Clare's poems reflect a proto-environmental awareness of natural systems (see McKusick's Green Writing as well as Bate's The Song of the Earth). Margaret Grainger's edition of the poet's natural history writings show his interest in depicting nature in prose as well as in poetry; impressed by the writings of Gilbert White, Clare hoped to record the natural phenomena he saw in the fields around Helpston, the small Northamptonshire town in which he lived. So precise were Clare's observations as a naturalist that Edmund Gosse complained the poet "was a camera, not a mind," suggesting that he viewed Clare's work as a collection of static images, frozen in time (qtd. in Storey 17). The essence of Clare's poetry, however, is movement, flux, process. Every new observation—a newly-discovered orchid variety, for example—affects how Clare perceives the world around him, and he delights in chronicling a world that changes from one moment to the next. John Barrell shows that in relation to the highly-structured visual landscapes of eighteenth-century nature poetry, Clare "developed a whole aesthetic of disorder" (152) in which the descriptive elements of a poem are "parts of the same complex impression, not just this and that, but this while that" (157). An ecologist by informal experience and careful observation, Clare describes not only a particular place, but a particular place at a unique moment in time, under distinct, novel conditions.

4. Clare's natural history writings are astonishing for their clarity of perception and their objective—one even might say scientific—way in which the poet records what he observes. These descriptions of natural phenemona are not static, and he excels at "utilizing the kinetic elements inherent in the picturesque vision. . . . Clare not only admits more detail into his work than most of his predecessors, he is also aware that those details are in constant mutation" (Brownlow 116). Clare's kinetic descriptions reflect living landscapes, made up of dynamic ecosystems, changing weather patterns, human and animal activities, plant growth and decay. His constant—and, some might say, obsessive—rewriting of local scenes, bird species, and plants evidences his view of nature in flux, in need of continual "updating."

5. To give a sense of the kinetic movement in Clare's work, the instructor might find it useful to center early discussions around how the poet "looks" at the natural world. Students could be asked to list the things that Clare sees in his poems, but also what he doesn't see: Which images stick out, and which are absent? What metaphors does Clare use, and how do these metaphors work to make the reader see natural phenomena in new ways? Nature writing tends to emphasize the visual, so students can be asked to analyze the "camera eye" of the writer; such class discussions can be speculative (especially if students have training in film theory!), but they can also help students begin to understand how Clare's poems emphasize natural systems from one poem to the next—like a series of windows framing dynamic images of the natural world. It's useful to look at bundles of related poems to build on this sense: an exploration of three bird poems together demonstrates Clare's "thick" description of habitat, how he portrays instinctual behaviors, the look of a crow as it crosses the afternoon sky.         

6. Clare's writings display his strong emotional attachment to the landscape surrounding Helpston, a "rootedness" (no pun intended) and an awareness "of the relation of all creatures to a habitat in which the human observer is also implicated" (McKusick 80). To quote Edward Storey, "Clare's contact with the land was a physical one" (51). Such a connection is intimate, based on a day-to-day familiarity with a place, which is really the sum of its natural processes: The loss of a single life has a negative impact on the entire system, which becomes less diverse (and less resilient). While Clare was obviously no ecologist in the modern sense—the term ecology itself wouldn't even be coined till after his death—he nevertheless had a clear, intuitive sense of the value of a diverse ecosystem, and he could be very protective of animals, trees, streams, and even landforms. In a letter to his publisher John Taylor in 1821, Clare expresses his grief at the impending loss of a pair of old elm trees growing near his cottage:

   my two favorite Elm trees at the back of the hut are condemned to dye it shocks me but tis true the saveage who owns them thinks they have done their best & now he wants to make use of the benefits he can get from selling them—O was this country Egypt & was I but a caliph the owner shoud loose his ears for his arragant presumption & the first wretch that buried his axe in their roots shoud hang on their branches as a terror to the rest—I have been several mornings to bid them farewell—had I £100 to spare I would buy their reprieves—but they must dye. . . . (qtd. in Bate 172)

   Clare's shock at the loss of the two elms is heightened by the injustice of their deaths. Like an innocent man standing on the gallows, the trees are "condemned" to die and past "reprieve"; they must be cut because the owner wants the "benefits" of "selling them." Their usefulness to birds, or to humans desiring shade, is not considered. Such a domestic function is un-enclosable, and Clare's own emotional connection to these trees—while quite powerful—counts for nothing on a balance sheet. The poet's fantasy of cropping the ears of the "wretch" who would chop down the trees underscores the illegality of the act and links chopping trees with counterfeiting: Clare here suggests that the tree has some essential (and unenclosable) value that has been stolen by its greedy, coining owner.

7. Clare's "The Fallen Elm" memorializes a beloved tree and exposes the injustice perpetrated by an economic system that ignores its ecological—one could say its domestic—value, requiring it be cut down. By making the tree a part of his family, Clare argues for a new relationship between humans and living things, all part of a continuous ecological whole. The opening lines of the poem beautifully portray the tree as it leans closely over Clare's cottage, protecting the poet and his family and offering a kind of gentle companionship:

   Old elm that murmured in our chimney top
   The sweetest anthem autumn ever made
   And into mellow whispering calms would drop
   When showers fell on thy many-coloured shade
   And when dark tempests mimic thunder made
   While darkness came as it would strangle light
   With the black tempest of a winter night
   That rocked thee like a cradle to thy root,
   How did I love to hear the winds upbraid
   Thy strength without—while all within was mute.
   It seasoned comfort to our hearts' desire,
   We felt thy kind protection like a friend
   And edged our chairs up closed to the fire,
   Enjoying comforts that was never penned. (lines 1-14)

   The lush consonance in this passage evokes a kind of Keatsian, luxurious ease (especially when read aloud). Indeed, Clare's letter to Taylor about the condemned elms was written around the time that Clare heard of Keats's death in Italy, and one wonders if the sonorous, Keatsian qualities in the above lines represent a kind of subtle elegy. The domestic images in the poem's first thirty-six lines underscore the fact that the tree gives both protection and comfort; the soft murmur through the chimney links the elm to tender (and attentive) parental care, a detail Clare reinforces by depicting the tree as a "cradle," a safe place protecting the human family from the violence of the elements. The elm is nature's "domestic tree" (line 18); its "homely bower" (line 21) attracts children, who build "playhouse rings of sticks and stone" (line 24) under its protective branches. Social psychologist M. Kirkby has researched the attraction of children to the canopies of trees, which provide a kind of refuge associated with the safety of a home environment (1-12). Indeed, Clare's pun on the word homely—with connotations of simplicity and the domestic—connects the elm in an intimate way with the poet's own cottage, so that tree and home become inextricably associated. The loss of the tree, Clare suggests, is intensely personal, a "domestic" loss—a death in the family.

8. Part of the tree's power is its tough longevity—it is the "sacred dower" of "time" (line 17) (again, one is reminded of Keats and his Grecian urn, the "bride" of "time"). Children play under its branches, and their games establish an associative link between comfort, the domestic, and nature. Such games—tree-climbing and apple gathering—perhaps domesticate nature on one level, but they also expand human zones of intimacy to include "wild" spaces. Early childhood exploration can lead to an almost sacramental relationship with particular locales, so that these locales gain the coloring of personality, heavily invested with an individual's history. A visit to a loved spot (like Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," to give but one example) can become a kind of ritual, an opportunity for self-reflection. The seeming permanence of the tree enables the poet to form a specific and intimate bond—one steeped in his family's continuous history. The elm is "steadfast to [its] home" (line 20), taking a kind of ownership over the humans living under it, even as the humans take a kind of affectionate ownership over it. Its destruction thus makes Clare's own family more vulnerable. As Jonathan Bate writes, "the elm tree is a temporal as well as a spatial landmark [for Clare]. Because it was there when he was a boy, it guarantees the continuity of his own life" (174-175). Clare's sense of loss at the felling of the tree is related