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It is often said that there are many paths to the top of a mountain, but the view is the same. But it is also true that where you begin determines where you'll end. Some paths have basic bifurcations; the choice made then positions the protagonists, leading to divergent outcomes. One of these fundamental dichotomies is that of 'man' and 'nature'. It is this dichotomy that is played out in John Clare's poem 'The Lament of Swordy Well'. Ownership of the meadow changes from common to enclosed land - a change that shifts the position of 'nature' from sovereignty and selfdetermination to subjugation by 'man'. This results in exploitation, degradation, and consequential loss of flowers, bees and butterflies. In this essay I explore the concept of the 'giving spirit' of nature, which recognises nature's intrinsic rights, and contrast it with that of the 'controlling ancestor', a concept which highlights humans' intrinsic assumption of property rights and, indeed, dominion over the natural world.
Since the Romantic period, it has not been unusual for writers to attribute a 'voice' to nature; what differentiates Clare's presentation of Swordy Well is his resistance to cliché. Instead of personifying his meadow-narrator as mythical, gendered deity, he characterises it as sentient - a living being in its own right, simultaneously capable of giving and receiving. In this narrative, what it receives is injustice.
Im swordy well a piece of land
Thats fell upon the town
Who worked me till I couldnt stand
& crush me now Im down1
In contrast, most voices of nature in poetry are the poet projecting their own thoughts as a human into a non-human form. Nature's identity is often confused by anthropomorphism, for example the poetic voice can be allegorical as in Louise Glück's 'The Wild Iris': 'It is terrible to survive as consciousness / buried in the dark earth'. Or else the voice can be shamanic, and so just an altered human form, as in Ted Hughes's 'Thought Fox': 'Till, with sudden sharp hot stink of fox / It enters the dark hole of the head'. And the shapeshifting hare in Robert Graves's compilation of witches' chants in 'The Allansford Pursuit': 'Oh, I shall go into the hare / With sorrow and sighing and mickle...