In recent years, John Clare’s poetry has enjoyed renewed attention due to the climate crisis and the increased prominence of the environmental movement. In contrast to other Romantic poets, who are often accused of celebrating the natural world without really knowing it, and who sometimes presented the natural world as entirely separate from human life, Clare was a native of the countryside who paid careful attention to the lives of even its smallest creatures, and saw the many connections between the human world and the most seemingly idyllic places. We can thus see Clare as a poet who was unusually attuned to “ecology.”
Ecologists study the connections between living creatures and their environments, climates, and one another. This approach has displaced earlier approaches which tended to study species as individuals, while often downplaying their relationships with other species and the broader environment. Although originally a scientific perspective, today scholars in the environmental humanities, or people who study fields like literature, sociology, or history with an environmental focus, have adopted ecology as a useful term for emphasizing the importance of interconnection.
In “The Yellowhammer’s Nest,” John Clare plays up the ecology of the countryside in a few different ways. In the beginning of the poem, he notices that the yellowhammer’s nest is made of the waste left behind by farming. The phrase “bleachèd stubbles and the withered fare” uses adjectives with negative connotations, suggesting that the speaker’s tone towards the farmers is more critical than his attitude towards the warbler, which is extremely sympathetic. Ultimately, however, he is just recording what he observes: the actions of humans affect all the inhabitants of the countryside.
The ending of the poem also has ecological ramifications, but in a different vein. First, Clare emphasizes that the warbler’s home operates according to the same rules that apply everywhere: there’s always suffering, disease, and death. Rather than an isolated place and species, he contextualizes it in terms of the environment in a broad sense. More specifically, he emphasizes that in this particular ecosystem, the warbler is prey for the snake. The nest cannot be appreciated on its own, because it is inextricably connected to a whole web of other life, from the horse hairs that make up its nest, to the snake that comes for its eggs.
However, Clare’s attitude towards the snake is far more critical than his stance towards the nest made of twigs from farming. He sees the snake from the bird’s perspective, as a villain who brings heartbreak. We might read this incident as an example of the tension between an ecological perspective and an empathetic focus on the individual creature. In one sense, Clare’s sympathy with the warbler is a form of radical environmental thought, because it takes the bird seriously as a fellow creature. Yet, on the other hand, it obscures the healthy ecological system which underpins the snake’s preying on the yellowhammer’s young.
