The Sublime and the Everyday
In “Autumn,” John Clare suggests that the sublime and the everyday can coexist. As we discuss at more length in the section of this guide on the topic, the sublime is an experience of awe and terror, often in response to landscapes too vast for the human mind to comprehend. It was an extremely popular subject for poetry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, because it created space for a spiritual experience without requiring religious belief. However, poetry of the sublime usually centered extraordinary places and experiences—the mountains, the ocean, abandoned ruins, or fantasy encounters were especially popular subjects. In the final stanza of “Autumn,” Clare instead depicts the sublime as something we can encounter in the ordinary British countryside. The sun makes the whole landscape glitter and fills the air with warm light like liquid gold. Anyone who takes the time to look around will encounter “Eternity” in that golden landscape. At the same time, Clare uses similes to link the countryside and the domestic world. He compares a hot spring to a boiling pot, and the parched ground to overbaked bread. These similes integrate the autumnal landscape within the world of country life, rather than attempting to render it separate from ordinary life like many other sublime landscapes. This juxtaposition of the everyday and the sublime suggests that one need not leave ordinary life behind to experience something bigger than oneself.
Death and the End of Summer
Although “Autumn” ultimately depicts the fall as a season where one can encounter the sublime, much of the poem emphasizes the harshness of the end of summer, rather than its beauty. Oddly, although the weather gets colder in the autumn, Clare repeatedly refers to heat. A hot spring boils up, the hill-tops glitter like “hot iron,” and the ground and grass are baked in the sun. These images center the lingering summer heat over the coming cold of winter. That unusual emphasis serves two purposes. It casts Autumn as the end of the hot summer, rather than the beginning of something new, which makes the season feel more melancholy. It also emphasizes the harshness of the season. Rather than a respite from the heat of the high summer, Clare’s autumnal landscape retains that heat. In the second stanza, the heat kills, leaving the ground parched and cracked and the “greensward” wracked, all the grass dried up and dead. Though the speaker experiences the landscape as beautiful, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder: for the organic world of the landscape itself, autumn is a time of death and destruction.
Power of the Gaze
As we discuss in the previous theme, Clare casts autumn as a time of death and destruction for the landscape. However, the human observer can experience that same landscape as the place of “Eternity.” Death and eternity appear mutually exclusive: the former is the ultimate ending, while the latter is the absence of an ending. However, anyone who “looks” round will find Eternity in the harsh autumnal landscape. The second stanza teaches us how this might be possible. Clare first stresses how dry the landscape is: the ground has cracked, and the grass is dried up and dead. However, the “fields glitter like water.” Indeed, it is the very dryness of the fields that gives them a hard surface that can glitter like water in the sunlight. Here, as in the last stanza, the presence of the human gaze allows opposites to coexist: the dry fields, and the glittering of water in the sunlight. In the final stanza, Clare more explicitly emphasizes the power of the gaze. He writes, “and the rivers we’re eying burn to gold as they run.” The strange verb “eying” makes us notice the action more than if Clare had used a more conventional phrase like “looking at” or “seeing.” It also emphasizes the physicality of the body, so that it feels like the human eye is doing something to the rivers. Beneath that “eying,” the rivers “burn to gold,” one of the sublime images of the last stanza. Similarly, in the final line, Clare writes “whoever looks round sees Eternity.” Again, the act of seeing is an important component of encountering the sublime in the ordinary landscape. Moreover, as with the glittering field, looking provides space for opposites to coexist: the speaker sees the death of the greensward and the eternity of the light in the same place.
