Repetition and Clare’s Lyric of Withdrawn Revelation

This article argues that certain works by John Clare constitute what I term the lyric of withdrawn revelation, in which the lyric subject attempts to inscribe a nonhuman natural object in its discourse, both for mimetic and expressive purposes, but is prevented from doing so because of the nonhuman’s radical dissimilarity to the human. The sonnet “November” and the triple sonnet “The Flood” exemplify this type of lyric by deploying two relational tropes, apostrophe and allegory, respectively, to establish an affinity between human subject and nonhuman object that functions on the subject’s own terms. The poems’ prosodic, sound, and rhetorical patterning facilitates apostrophe’s and allegory’s logic of resemblance insofar as regular repetition appeals to the human conceptual appetite for patterns; as a result, the nonhuman object’s proneness to regularly patterned discourse suggests the object’s likeness to the human lyric subject. Syntactic and figurative irregularity, however, emerges equally as an iterative form in these lyrics to clash with regular repetition and disrupt the logic of affinity that the latter furthers. The tension created points to the nonhuman object’s status not as a transcendental signified, but as an extra-discursive context that informs yet remains extrinsic to lyric utterance.