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Wonder: Some Reflections on John Clare and Henry David Thoreau
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Wonder: Some Reflections on John Clare and Henry David Thoreau
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Journal Article
Wonder: Some Reflections on John Clare and Henry David Thoreau
2015
Overview
[...]the word crops up three times in 'The Stonepit',2 where the traveller is struck to be looking down from above on to the tops of trees and the birds' nests in a deep quarry; it occurs twice in 'The Ants',3 where Clare is marvelling at the organisation and industry of an ant colony; it is mentioned three times in 'November',4 where people both wonder and wander in the fog on the dull, dark days of that month,- three times again in 'The Squirrel's Nest',5 where Clare is puzzled by a construction of twigs in a tree that he first thinks is a bird's nest and then goes off wondering about it; and then once in 'Swordy Well', where he contrasts 'the wonders of great nature's plan' with the destructive power of man.6 In these and similar passages Clare is combining a number of notions later separated out in our culture, and this seems to me to be a characteristic of a certain kind of nature writing whose key feature is the habit of close attention. When aged just twenty, he made the following striking statement in a graduation address at Harvard on 30 August 1837, under the grand title, 'The Commercial Spirit of Modern Times: Considered in its influence on the Political, Moral and Literary Character of a Nation': This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient, more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used. [...]there is also a radically different strain in contemporary writing and thinking about the natural world that-often more out of desperation than conviction, I suspect-feels obliged to accept the premises of the prevailing political culture and justify the conservation of our natural heritage through the 'natural services' it provides that can be assigned a financial value. The argument is that natural systems, when properly valued, offer huge and quantifiable benefits to human welfare and economic prosperity, but are too often taken for granted or even regarded as a cost.
Publisher
John Clare Society
