John Clare’s The Shepherd’s Calendar and Forms of Repetition

Abstract

In The Shepherd’s Calendar, Clare’s preoccupation with constancy vs change surfaces through attention to ritual, traditions, and the functioning of the community according to a cyclical year. The Calendar celebrates forms of knowledge dependent upon repetition, while exploiting poetic conventions which are themselves inherently repetitious. This chapter considers poetic self-consciousness, and the negotiation of sameness and fractional difference in descriptive poetry (especially in a Johnsonian context of specificity and generality): what might it really mean to ‘know’ something, and thus to represent it accurately? Clare’s writing registers that repetitions in the world and in poetry are never exactly the same, but posits irregularity as an aspect of natural regularity, indicative of nature’s artistry. The eponymous shepherd indicates Clare’s interest in knowledge amassed through repeated experience which is both individual and collective, and he illuminates Clare’s negotiation of the categories of lyric and narrative verse (themselves tied up with what it might mean to ‘know’ the subjects of the poem). Through close reading, the chapter examines Clare’s experiments with repetition, and, against the backdrop of a self-conscious attention to listening in the poem, suggests that they reflect upon the possibility of adequate expression in poetry.