Dorothy and Clare

I also took another look at recollections after a Ramble, and it struck me that the way Clare interacts with and writes about his surroundings seems particularly similar to how Dorothy does in her diary in this work. Like Dorothy, Clare’s consciousness is primarily entrenched in the present and he spends a great deal of his poem cataloging the beauty of the local environment around him in a seemingly endless list. He also focuses on the everyday dealings of the people of the town from the position of a passive observer. He even makes references to Wordsworth’s poems, like in the lines “And Goody begg'd a helping hand / To heave her rotten faggot up.” Clare also at times infuses his scenes with a sense of melancholy and it is in these instances he breaks away from the present and travels to the past in a fit of nostalgia allowing him to engage in a bit more reflection than Dorothy achieves. I wish he would have focused more of his work on these areas as the copious descriptions of nature, though beautiful, become a bit overwhelming for me as they did in Dorothy’s journals.