Clare and the Commons

I noticed that while both the poems “To An Insignificant Flower, Obscurely Blooming in a Lonely Wild” and “The Seasons” examine nature while providing social commentary and evidence of class tension, the treatment of nature is quite different in both poems. While nature was personified and treated as separate from humanity for most of Thompson’s poem (though the swain becomes one with nature in the end), Clare’s poem shows the intertwining of the two. In class we talked about how the Clare employs repetition of the rhyming words “me” and “thee,” and constantly uses similes comparing the flower and the speaker. I think this has the effect of melding them so that they almost become one. We also discussed how it is difficult to tell whether the poem is about his love for Emma or the flower and how relationships are jumbled just like the syntax of the poem. The Justseeds blog post discusses how as a peasant, Clare vehemently opposed the enclosure movement. Therefore, I think the point that he is trying to make is that you can’t disentangle the people who use the commons from their land because they are one, therefore you can’t divide up the land and make it private property.