Constant Inconstancy: Learning to Belong through John Clare’s Poetics of Attention

This paper focuses on, in short, education, community, and self. It begins with an analysis of how John Clare’s attention to his surroundings results in detailed poetry that ultimately becomes an educative project. This paper looks at some of Clare’s nest poems, specifically his ground nest poems, looking at techniques of rhythm, vocality, and dialect language. To figure Clare as an educator, however, establishing him as a person with a specific authority, we are led to a discussion of an in-betweenness in relation to communities — the natural and human. This paper explores the sense of centeredness in belonging in combination with a simultaneous marginalization, an eddying between understandings of self and others. Finally, this analysis suggests the idea that this oscillation can itself become a form of belonging because it is derived from a thorough, detailed and attentive knowledge and understanding of the other — suggesting that to know a creature’s habits and vulnerabilities is to love it, and also keep it protected. Ultimately, perhaps this kind of belonging may lead you, the walker, the poet, the listener to better understand your sense of self and place.