‘I can hear the colours’- John Clare and sensory perception
[Based on an informal piece for the John Clare newsletter 2019]
John Clare (1793-1864) is amongst the greatest English nature poets of the Romantic period. Born in Helpston in Northamptonshire into a family of poor agricultural labourers, he was largely self-taught and educated.A childhood spent wandering and playing in the fields and woodlands of his native county developed into a fascination for nature. The young Clare’s powers of observation were exemplary, his knowledge and understanding of the natural world profound.
It was an impulse to get down on his knees and examine in microscopic detail the petals of a flower, the shell of a snail, the intricacies of a bird’s nest that singled him out as someone special. It was also a keen sensitivity. It was a life accustomed to hard physical labour. It wasa life fashioned by periods of hunger and days of gathering. These factors combined gave him a uniquely personal connection tothis patch of England bordering the fens as Felstiner (2009:14)points out.‘Clare typically presents himself in an embodied, participatory relationship with his environment as he moves through and interacts with his surroundings rather than composing the landscape from a single, stationed point of view located outside of it’. He did not seek for poetry in vast vistas or the spectacular. As Felstiner also makes clear John Clare was an insider not an onlooker.For him the details of colour, texture, pattern and form, the beauty of his countrysidecaptivated the imagination. This captivation poured onto the page in breathtaking verse.
Clare, the poet, wrote with the eye of a painter and ear of a musician. It is this heightened sensory perception which marks him out, but also raises an intriguing possibility. Could he sense the environment in a different way? Were his senses so finely tuned they burst into his brain and onto the page, a storm of images, recollections, observations? Could it be possible that he was synaesthetic? While it cannot be proven it would explain in part the near-mystical way in which he experienced the natural environment.
In this meaning of the wordsynaesthesia is defined as a rare neurological condition where two or more senses entwine, in particular a form known aschromesthesia.This conditionperceives an association of everyday sounds with colours and colours with sounds.Cytowic (2009:119) describes the effects like this ‘Chromesthesia is something like fireworks, voice music and assorted environmental sounds such as clattering dishes and firework shapes that arise, move around and then fade when the sound fades’.Among famous synesthetes were the painter Kandinsky, the composer Messiaen, the physicist Feynman and perhaps the poet John Clare?
Clare’s synaesthesia is notthat of literary figurative language but rather an amalgam of internalised sensory experiences where colours sing, and sounds fly into colours and shades. A very personal internalisation of the outside world.There can, of course, be no proof for a condition not recognised at the time. No evidence would pass muster in scientific circles today, but if this were the case, it would shed new light on the creative process of Clare’s poetry, open absorbing insights into the use of description and metaphor.
His fascination with colour, his painter’s eye,was observed and commented on by Winterson(2015) in a paper given at a John Clare conference in 2014. She talks about his descriptions of light, giving as an example November inThe Shepherds Calendar.
The Owlet leaves her hiding place at noon
And flaps her grey wings in the doubling light. (lines 19-20)
Winterson focuses on Clare’s portrayal of light as the owl leaves its roosting place.
The image of ‘doubling light’ is incredibly evocative. One is not sure if the light is intensifying or depleting. It could be either or simultaneously both – or it is in a twilight zone, leading us to new worlds. Doubling at the very least suggests folding back on itself, veiling and layering.
This fascination reveals itself repeatedly. In Rural Morning for example:
Soon the twilight through the distant mist
In silver hemming skirts the purple east
Ere yet the sun unveils his smiles to view. (lines 1-3)
Again, in Rural Evening:
The sun now sinks behind the woodland green
And twittering spangles go the leaves between. (lines 1-2)
If Clare experienced chromesthesia the visual and auditory inputs would have resembled an assault on the senses, a double assault, both sound and vision modulating and merging. The poet forced to grasp bursts of stimuliand weave them together. Could he hear ‘the twilight through the distant mist’? Was the sound of twittering spangles a xylophone, a glockenspiel?
The dangers are of course over stimulation, bursts of euphoria, the rewards a consummation of the fantastic. How do you communicate these feelings to others who perceive in a different way? Was this his artistic dilemma? Yetit might explain Clare’s passion for the details of colour, his delicacy of observation in that he just saw and heard things differently. He was also unafraid as he attempted to communicate.
Fiona Stafford (2015:18) explores this in The wind blows happily on everything.
I love the luscious green before the bloom
The leaves and grass and even beds of moss
When leaves gin bud and spring prepares to come
The ivysevergreen the brown green gorse
Plots of green weeds that barest roads engross
In fact I love the youth of each green thing
The grass the bushes and the moss
That pleases little birds and makes them sing
I love the green before the blooms of spring. (lines 10-18)
She goes on to make the point.‘Not every poet would risk the same, simple word six times in a nine-line stanza, but here ‘green’ seems to grow in intensity with every new instance linking the line acoustically, visually and imaginatively’.
Here the senses blend and unfold as words. Green is not one colour but many differentshades, fizzing in reflected light and vibrating with sound. The use of the word intensity is particularly apt. It was not just the mesmerising qualities of light that held his attention. Clare’s fascination with birds and nests may also illustrate this facet of his experience. In The Yellowhammers Nestfor example:
Five eggs, pen- scribbled over lilac shells
Resembling writing scrawls which fancy reads
As natures poesy and pastoral spells. (lines 13-15)
The Thrushes Nest
There lay her shining eggs as bright as flowers
Ink spotted over shells of greeny blue. (lines 10 – 11)
The nest becomes a circular stave with a notation of ink spots and again the reference to shades of green.
It is easy to imagine Clare, purposefully tramping through the Northamptonshire fields and fen country absorbing every sight, sound, pattern and texture, delighting in the environment, becoming as one with it. A restless sensory receptor.
Summer
‘How sweet when weary dropping on a bank
Turning a look around on things that be
Een feather headed grasses spindling rank
A trembling to the breeze one loves to see
And yellow buttercups where many a bee
Comes buzzing to its head and bows it down
And the great dragonflyewi gauzy wings
In gilded coat of purple green or brown
That on broad leaves of hazel basking clings.’ (lines 1-8)
Nothing is missed, the scene, a momentary instant of time is absorbed and consumed.Clare is in the midst of an emotional and sensory whirlpool. The absence of punctuation serving only to emphasise this interconnectedness.
It was not only his observational skills but his ability to listen, to delineate sound that gives a special tint to his poetry. John Clare was of course musically inclined, the writer of many songs, synaesthesia possibly enhancing the musical impulse. He was endowed with fine auditory discernment.An example being Pleasant Soundswhere he describes the rustling of leaves, crumpling of cat-ice, wind halloos, the whizzing of larger birds, the patter of squirrels. Weiner (2009:371) acknowledges this point.‘Clare’s career as a poet began in eager listening: before he was a pupil of James Thomson and William Cowper, he tells us, he was a student of nature’smusic.’She goes on to state. ‘Though it is Clare’s sharp, discerning vision that garnered the lion’s share of critical attention, his sense of hearing is fundamental to the themes and techniques of his descriptive work’.
This close and active listening may have taken on a spiritual quality. Mason (2015:97) argues from this standpoint.‘Through a listening to all the world – natural, spiritual, human, non- human – Clare is granted a way of conceptualising and thinking about the world that he carries from his dreams to his waking world, writing it down ‘to prolong the happiness of my faith’.In this sense, his faith isrooted in the confluence of the natural and man-made elements of thecountryside, but it is also indicative of acute sensory awareness and the processing of these senses into images, which in his mind take on aspects of otherworldly experience.She goes on to explain.‘The reorientation of our attention from trees to churches, kinship to shipwrecks, pipe organs to ‘open-air’ music – enacts a synesthetic gathering of dualisms into an ontology of universal kinship’.
This understanding of the connection between the physical and the ethereal is profoundly moving, particularly when expressed with Clare’s restless curiosity.Herecognises the countryside is not static, it shifts and wanes with the weather, the seasons, the cycle of agricultural practice. Movement is an abiding theme in his poetry, whether it be the movement from child to adult, to the enclosure of common land, or simply:
Summer pleasures they are gone like to visions everyone
And the cloudy days of autumn and of winter cometh on
I tried to call them back but unbidden they are gone
Far away from heart and eye and forever far away.
Remembrances (lines 1-4)
With his senses did he conceptualise a visual and auditory kaleidoscope? Is it possible to imagine a phantasmagoria of shifting colours and sounds almost painful to absorb?While at the same time euphoric and frustrating because mere words were not enough to do justice to the experience.
Perhaps this need to manage a heightened sensory perception, to share this sense of wonder with others, encouraged the life long drive to write poetry, even in the most harrowing of circumstances. Maybe, just maybe, it was a contributing factor in the slide towards mental disorder and the bi-polar tendencies, the manic depression of his later years. It is impossible to say. He was, after all, a superficially simple but in actuality, a psychologically complex individual.
It is quite possible to argue that John Clare was merely unusually observant, an exceptionally gifted naturalist. That he was a man finely attuned to the nuances of the natural world is without a doubt. He recognised the vulnerabilities of the environment and by extension hisvulnerabilities in the harsh realities of his age. My own feeling, and it is only a feeling, is there was more too it, a depth and excitement consistent with forms of synaesthesia.
I take the line‘The buttercups head bending down under the weight of a bee’.The yellow of the buttercup is a trumpet blast, the beea ripple of a violin, a descending passage of music as the flower bows down. Could it be?As stated earlier the link between John Clare and synaesthesia is impossible to establish,andI offer the possibility playfully, as an interesting conjecture. So here the question lies,and the answer awaits.
Notes
Cytowic, R.E., 2009.Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the brain of Synaesthesia. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press.
Felstiner, J., 2009. Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems.New Haven:Yale University Press.
Mason,E., 2015 Ecology with Religion: kinship in John Clarein New Essays on John Clare: Poetry,Culture and Community. Ed. Kövesi, S. and McEathron, S., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stafford, F., 2015 John Clare’s colours in New Essays on John Clare: Poetry,Culture and Community. Ed. Kövesi, S. and McEathron, S., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weiner, S.K.,‘Listening with John Clare’Studies in Romanticism. Vol. 48. No. 3 (Fall 2009).
Winterson, L., May 2014 ‘Doubling Light – John Clare the layering of vision in my painting’.John Clare Conference. Oxford Brookes University. Oxford.