The language of intrusion in Clare and Burns Anonymous College

Both John Clare and Robert Burns are poets invested in rural lives - in dialect, in tradition, in worlds previously voiced only by aural tradition. The poet who chooses to reveal these intimate portraits of a life all but completely hidden from literature is somewhat like a spy in his own village. Every appropriation of a dialect word is a type of thievery - in a way, Clare is right to see himself as a ‘robber’. He is taking something that sprang from the landscape or the tongues of the local people and enfranchising it within a literary culture that has shunned such inclusiveness for centuries.

O rural life what charms thy meanness hide

What sweet descriptions bards disdain to sing

What Loves what Graces on thy plains abide

O could I soar me on the muses wing

What riffel’d charms should my researches bring

Pleas’d would I wander where these charms reside

Of rural sports and beauties would I sing

Those beauties wealth which you but vain deride

Beauties of richest bloom superior to your pride.

Clare, ‘The Harvest Morning’ l.65-73

Clare is a poet anxious to find his place. He is at once tied to the ‘rural life’ that he, from childhood, has had access to, and uncertain of where, within language, to locate his feelings. Need he...