Throughout this guide, we refer to the final stanza of “Autumn” as depicting an experience of the “sublime.” The sublime was an extremely important idea in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The term is a little hard to pin down, but the critic Martin Price defines it as “an experience of transcendence, a surpassing of convention or reasonable limits, an attempt to come to terms with the unimaginable.” In an increasingly secular world, where the mysteries of religion were being displaced by scientific rationalism, the sublime became an appealing alternative to a life governed purely by natural order. Without requiring belief in a specific God, the sublime asserted that the world still had room for transcendent, mysterious, and inexpressible experiences.
For the Romantic poets, the sublime was encountered in the natural world, especially in the vastness of the mountains and the sea. Crucially, it is not synonymous with “beautiful.” Sublime is closer to awe-inspiring, but the experience was also associated with feelings of terror. Furthermore, although many Romantic poets valued the natural world for its ability to stimulate awe, they were not always especially close or accurate observers of the landscape. They often included fantasy figures like elves and fairies in their versions of the landscape, and also emphasizes human presence, especially ruins, to create a sense of historical depth and excitement. Arguably, many of these poets were as enamored with their own imaginations as they were with the natural world.
Clare, in contrast, was a remarkably close observer of the natural world, and he almost always avoided incorporating fantasy elements in his poetry. Indeed, he mocked his contemporary Keats for seeking “behind every rose bush…a Venus and under every laurel a thrumming Apollo.” Keats came from the city, and saw the natural landscape as an exciting place to escape the stresses of modern life and let the imagination run free. For Clare, who grew up as a peasant, the countryside was home. It was beautiful, but it was also intertwined with economic and social issues. His investment in the reality of the countryside has led some critics to see Clare as more of a “picturesque” than “sublime” poet—more interested in creating a true-to-life picture of the countryside and its beauty than soaring accounts of its capacity to inspire awe. Furthermore, he likely never saw the mountains or the sea, those vast natural vistas that were most compelling for the other Romantics. The English countryside, with its farmland and little villages, was at a much smaller scale, and always a less popular subject matter for sublime poets.
However, the final stanza of “Autumn” clearly depicts a sublime experience. The light of the sun transforms the landscape into a strange and overwhelming place. The burning hot ground would be out of place in a depiction of a pretty country landscape—this is a more intense, bizarre experience, one which cannot be fully contained in the word “beautiful.” The reference to “Eternity” in the final line even more closely adheres to Martin’s definition of the sublime as an encounter with the “unimaginable” or with things that surpass “reasonable limits.” By juxtaposing this sublime experience with his careful description of the material world, Clare suggests that one does not need fantasy creatures or vast vistas to encounter the sublime. The mysterious and the transcendent can be found in the ordinary English countryside, if one knows how to look.
