This chapter will consider John Clare’s most distinctive middle-period poetry in the context of the humanism that informed and continues to inform human relations with the non-human. The chapter unapologetically brings to bear recent developments in post-humanist theory in its analysis of Clare’s poetry because this is the only way to fully illuminate the radical nature of Clare’s poetic vision. In his recent account of humanisms since early modernity, Tony Davies identifies several different versions, all driven by an anthropocentric ‘master narrative of transcendental Man’ that relegates non-human beings to subordinate status (p. 141). Of course, this does not tell the whole story, and there have always been dissenting voices. The Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) argued that ‘man is no better than the animals’ (p. 330). During the period dominated by ‘rationalistic humanism’ (Davies, p. 140), some counter-Enlightenment figures, notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), ‘associated modern science with vanity and a destructive and unhealthy urge to dominate’ both human society and nature (Gerrard, p. 5). As Nathaniel Wolloch observes, Rousseau often discusses animals and ‘advocates sympathy for the suffering of non-human beings’. Even in Rousseau (and Montaigne) though, ‘when human and animal interests collided there was no doubt that the latter paid [the] price’ (p. 67). For Wolloch ‘the history of this anthropocentric outlook is almost […] continuous and uninterrupted in Western culture, and it underlies all but the [rarest] instances of ethical consideration […] of animals, even those [as in Montaigne] emphatically theriophilic’ (p. 69).

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British animal welfare movement gained momentum (Perkins, pp. 20–43). In general, the movement did, as Wolloch argues, remain bound within Enlightenment ‘rationalist humanism’, though some more iconoclastic thinkers explicitly challenged the humanist hierarchy of being, most prominently John Oswald (1791) and Joseph Ritson (1802). Like other radicals, such as Thomas Spence and Daniel Isaac Eaton, both ‘used animal metaphors to make political points’ in their early writing. Significantly though, their metaphors are also imbued ‘with opposition to animal slaughter’ (Spencer, pp. 207 and 213). In The Cry of Nature and Ritson’s Essay, however, they advocate an even more radical position on human–animal relations. Both had visited India and were influenced by the recognition of kinship between the human and non-human in Hindu doctrine, even if culture and practice did not always reflect this doctrine. Oswald remarks that the Hindu ‘beholds in every creature, a kinsman; he rejoices in the welfare of every animal, and compassionates his pains; for he knows, and is convinced, that of all creatures the essence is the same, and that one eternal cause is the father of us all’ (pp. 5–6). As an atheist and disciple of Rousseau, he also asserted that ‘humane conduct’ towards non-human animals – our ‘mute brethren’ – can be justified by ‘arguments, independent of mythology [religion]’ (p. 210). Ritson anticipates the post-humanist position regarding human–animal relations, explicitly arguing that a human’s ‘organization seems to differ very little, if at all, from that of the ourang-outang’ and that the ‘resemblance […] is too strong to deny that they are, at least, distinct species of one and the same genus’ (pp. 14 and 27). As Jane Spencer demonstrates, Ritson’s ‘proto-Darwinism’ debunks ‘supposedly unique human traits’ and ‘takes the naturalist’s view that humankind is one animal among many to a conclusion that modifies the rights of man’ (pp. 214–15). In other words, the rights of man are important, but they do not trump the rights of other beings. Such ideas ‘were too radical for the animal welfare campaign of the early nineteenth-century’, and the combination of radicalism, atheism and vegetarianism attracted considerable political hostility, ‘but they inspired later vegetarians’ (Spencer, p. 184).

Although not as publicly controversial as the radical Rousseauian animal-rights positions taken by Oswald and Ritson, and therefore not as contextually important, the anti-mechanistic strain in some counter-Enlightenment thought also needs to be considered before moving on to Clare’s poetry. Not because it was anti-mechanistic per se, but because in some thinkers it facilitated a more imaginative and creative approach to non-human nature. Peter Hans Reill places Alexander von Humboldt at the centre of this counter-discourse: ‘Alexander saw no separation between natural and human worlds; they were joined in our “most inner, receptive faculty” where “everything stands in […] ancient intercourse with the spiritual life of humans”’ (Reill, p. 22; citing Humboldt, p. 50). As Reill explains, for Humboldt, ‘humans were deeply enmeshed in the interaction of countless natural forces, [and] it was impossible for the mind to abstract itself from nature and comprehend it as a rational object. Rather, natural knowledge could only be won by immersing oneself in nature’s actions, by recording and seeing how nature recorded its pattern on the world and us’ (pp. 242–3). Humboldt problematises the human–animal boundary that continues to shape attitudes to the non-human in most areas of human activity, and it is easy to see why Elizabeth Milán makes a direct link between Humboldt and the post-humanist thinkers whose ideas will inform my reading of Clare’s poetry in the present chapter: ‘There is a certain affinity between Humboldt’s view of nature and the views of [post-humanists] such as Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Timothy Morton’ (p. 189). It is also significant that Humboldt’s so-called ‘aesthetic turn’, which was in part driven by his encounters with Goethe (Wulf, p. 36), stresses the need for an imaginative and creative response to nature. As Milán suggests, ‘one such affinity can be found in the work that poetry does for the environmental perspective [of] each thinker’ (p. 189). As far as we know, Clare was not directly influenced by Humboldt’s writings, but the parallels in their approach to non-human nature are nevertheless striking. Clare’s distinctive middle-period poetry is driven by an ‘aesthetic’ and imaginative ‘immer[sion]’ in nature, not replicated in the work of any other Romantic poet. This chapter traces the development of Clare’s visionary poetic to The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827) and then focuses on its full realisation in the experimental sonnets written while Clare was living in Northborough (1832–7), both of which John Goodridge considers landmark works (p. 98).

Much of Clare’s middle-period poetry is rooted in specific observation of the non-human (Heyes, p. 185). It is less often remarked upon (even in ecocritical responses to Clare) that, formally and rhetorically, many of these middle-period works challenge the anthropocentrism that is prominent in the poetry of the period, including most of the poems in Clare’s own Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820) and The Village Minstrel (1821). The contrast between these early works and The Shepherd’s Calendar, Clare’s next published volume, is striking. While there are narrative passages focusing exclusively on human activities, there are also many extended series of short vignettes that represent assorted human and non-human beings going about their separate business in the landscape. Clare’s editors cut many of them from the published version because they did not focus sufficiently on the human subject, or explore human subjectivity (Vardy, pp. 137–44), thereby obscuring the development of Clare’s ontology and poetics. James Augustus Hessey summed up his and John Taylor’s view of the original versions of January–December (of The Shepherd’s Calendar) in a letter dated 3 November 1824: ‘The great fault of the whole of them is that they abound in too much description & are deficient in Feeling and Sentiment and human Interest’; description must be ‘subordinate to higher objects’ (Storey, p. 74). These vignette series are particularly interesting for the purposes of this chapter because the non-human being no longer functions as it had done in much of Clare’s early poetry – that is, as a vehicle for, or a way of introducing, anthropocentric reflections on the vagaries of human existence. A germane example is the section that immediately follows the opening tavern scene in the original manuscript version of ‘January’:

The t[h]resher first thro darkness deep

Awakes the mornings winter sleep

Scaring the owlet from her prey

Long before she dreams of day

That bli[n]ks above head on the mow

Watching the mice that squeaks below

& foddering boys sojourn again

By rhyme hung hedge & frozen plain

Shuffling thro the sinking snows

Blowing his fingers as he goes

To were the stock in bellowings hoarse

Call for their meals in dreary close (Clare, 2006, lines 31–42)

Of course, this passage is in some respects informed by a latent anthropocentrism. The word ‘stock’ associates animals with inanimate commercial goods and invisible financial capital. We use the word for domesticated farm animals to elide the fact that they are living beings. The passage does nevertheless problematise the humanist ‘chain of being’, which, although initially a ‘religiously motivated view […] was later assimilated within […] the Scientific Revolution and subsequently […] the Enlightenment’ (Wolloch, p. 69). Only a very small number of counter-Enlightenment figures (like Humboldt) questioned ‘the basic human empire over nature’ (Wolloch, pp. 79–80), and the humanist hierarchy of being (Reill, p. 242).

In the fragments of rural life described by the unobtrusive third-person speaker, there is no sense that the interests of one being, whether human or non-human, are privileged over, or more important than those of another. The thresher begins his walk to the threshing barn, while the owlet (small or young owl) is hunting for prey. The mice who are looking for food on the mow (fen) survive for another day as the owlet’s hunt is disturbed, and the foddering boy fights the cold on his way to the cattle waiting for their feed. Humans are differentiated, in ways that non-human beings are not, to reflect the fact that within human communities we allocate different titles and responsibilities – for example farmer, thresher, foddering boy, shepherd, milkmaid – to different individuals. Nevertheless, the uncritical idea (which in practice continues to inform inter-species relations in the westernised world) that humans are or should be at the centre of things is disrupted. In some respects, this is a product of the new rhetorical structure. The anthropocentric rhetorical connecting matter that was foregrounded in so many of the poems published in Clare’s earlier collections is absent here. Successive vignettes are linked by connecting words – ‘scaring’, ‘watching’, ‘&’, ‘call’ – and where they have (limited) semantic significance, these words foreground the communication or inner world of non-human beings. To put it another way, the thresher blunderingly and unthinkingly disturbs the nocturnal owlet that is carefully watching potential prey, long before she ‘dreams’ of (or imagines) disturbance by diurnal beings.

This new post-humanist poetic is more prominent in the wonderful experimental middle-period sonnets written in Northborough (unpublished during Clare’s lifetime). In the sonnets published within Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery and The Village Minstrel, Clare is writing from within the established sonnet tradition and generally adopts an English/Shakespearian or Spenserian rhyme scheme and elaborate figurative rhetoric. As Sara Lodge observes, the early poetry, ‘anxious to claim membership of an audience capable of aesthetic taste and moral sentiment, falls too often into generic rhapsody or homily; though less well read, it appears more bookish’ (p. 548). In these poems the sonnet is mostly an anthropocentric vehicle for the exploration of the human condition, as it had generally been since the development of the form. Where the non-human appears at all, it is usually as a conceit to illustrate an aspect of human experience within an anthropocentric world. While writing from within the sonnet tradition, however, Clare expressed an intense dislike for prescriptive rules regarding poetic form. In a letter to Hessey written in July 1820, and commenting on John Keats’s Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820), he had expressed a wish that ‘those curs’d critics could be shoved out of the fashion with their rule & compass & cease from making readers believe a Sonnet cannot be a Sonnet unless it be precisely 14 lines’ (Clare, 1985, p. 80).

Intriguingly, the majority of the experimental Northborough sonnets are fourteen lines, so it seems that Clare was not in fact seriously concerned about this aspect of ‘critics […] rule and compass’, but there is a nevertheless significant shift in his poetics. Clare began to experiment with the couplet-sonnet in the poems included within ‘The Midsummer Cushion’ (1832) and The Rural Muse (1835), but his most distinctive achievements in the form were written at Northborough and are collected in the Carcanet Northborough Sonnets (1995) (see Lodge, p. 547). As the editors point out, although some of the earliest Northborough poems remain marked by the ‘sententious moralizing […] which had never been Clare’s most successful kind of writing’, the majority don’t treat subject matter in this way (Clare, 1995, p. ix). It is surely these poems that prompted David Duff to count Clare ‘the finest of all Romantic sonneteers’ (p. 16). Significantly, Clare completely rejects the rhetorical patterns and figurative language of his early sonnets in the most experimental poems. Joseph Phelan suggests that ‘the boundaries between poems seem to have dissolved altogether’ in these poems (p. 41). Several Clare scholars have also focused on the permeability of the Northborough sonnets, most recently Stephanie Weiner, who argues that they ‘celebrate the resonance between the poems’ permeable edges, the flux of time, and the infinite extension of space – celebrating, that is, the poems’ structural likeness to the unbounded world, whose units of time and space are shown to be human impositions, arbitrary and transient’ (p. 72). Other Clare scholars have looked for thematic coherence across groups of poems. Simon Kövesi observes that the poems in Peterborough Manuscript A61 generally involve representations of work in wintery conditions, and that they ‘tend to move through active sociability towards evening, towards dinner, towards bed’ (p. 102), in other words towards some kind of ending or resolution. This is by no means true of all the Northborough sonnets, and, as Weiner notes, many end with images that explicitly break ‘boundaries’ of enclosure: ‘Especially common are birds that fly away in a sonnet’s final words, but a dog also runs along’, a ploughman ‘lobs along’, and so on (p. 71). Clare clearly wished to disrupt or escape from what Phelan calls the ‘safety (or formal and rhetorical unities) to be found in the “nest of the sonnet”’ (p. 41). This chapter contends that Clare opens up the sonnet to liberate the poet and the form from its narrow anthropocentric (human-centred) ethos.

The Northborough sonnets focusing mainly on humans (and their domesticated animals) portray only brief fragments of lives. In the most formally experimental, there is no attempt to maintain the limited discursive coherence present in the passage from The Shepherd’s Calendar discussed earlier in this chapter. As Kövesi notes, there is implicit direction regarding motivation or character in some poems (pp. 103–4), but Sarah Houghton-Walker’s observation that the Northborough sonnets ‘are distinguished by […] factual observation and lack of judgment’ is broadly true (p. 103). Houghton-Walker’s point is in line with other criticism of Clare’s descriptive mode of writing – his accounts of human and non-human nature are not incorporated into an anthropocentric conceptual framework. Nor, as Weiner observes, are separate vignettes spatially and temporally related (p. 67). John Barrell and more recently Kövesi have explained the apparent incoherence of so many Northborough sonnets on the basis that, in an open-field landscape, ‘the field would […] present itself to the observer as a scene of continuous and simultaneous activity, carried on in all parts of the field yet visible “at a glance”, and in which the entire village is engaged’ (Barrell, p. 105; see also Kövesi, p. 100). The problem with this explanation is that it is simply not possible to argue that all of the vignettes represented in many individual poems could occur within the field of vision of a single individual. Kövesi himself points out that many poems move temporally across the day. This reading also restores the all-seeing, rationalising human subject to the centre of the prospect; a composite prospect admittedly, but still a prospect with a human at the centre. The first major line of argument in this chapter is that the very notion of a human-centred world is interrogated in Clare’s Northborough sonnets.

Derrida argues persuasively that assumptions about human reason and the human right to dominate nature always ‘had to go hand in hand with the interpretation of the essence of beings as objects, an object present as representation (Vorstellung), an object placed and positioned before a subject. This latter, a [hu]man who says “I”, an ego certain of itself, thus ensures his or [her] technical mastery over the totality of what is’ (2004, pp. 130–1). Clare’s open and loosely structured Northborough sonnets dislocate and decentre the human speaker. For Erica McAlpine, the poems thereby separate speaker and object, and draw attention to ‘nature’s “otherness”’ (pp. 82–3). Contrary to McAlpine’s reading, it is also arguable that the dislocated and decentred speaker or observing human subject is subsumed and immersed within nature, so that, in Timothy Morton’s terms, ‘nature’ (human and non-human nature) in fact ceases to be ‘an “object” over “yonder”’ (2008, p. 73; see also 2007, pp. 119–28). The following poem is a representative example of many:

The clumbsy ploughman knocks his hands

& stirs the fire before he goes

The cleanly maiden scarcely stands

Agen the door to scrape her shoes

& hurrys with the fagot in

The boy stands in the cart & tumbles down

The frozen turnip to the waiting cows

The frails are lumping all about the town

The old hens cackle & maids begin

With brush & mop to drive the dogs away

The shepherd whistles in his fist and fear

Drives the sheep on as if a dog was near

& drives them homeward through the dreary day

To keep them warm among the stacks and hay (1995, p. 102)

Vignettes are introduced by definite articles rather than the conjunctions, present participles and prepositions that bind them together grammatically and discursively in the passage from The Shepherd’s Calendar discussed earlier. The grammar in this Northborough sonnet does not indicate either a temporal or a spatial relationship between the different individuals represented. Several of the activities described take place within the ‘town’ (probably a small village or hamlet, given that threshing is being completed in several places [‘town’ can mean farmstead too]); some within dwellings, explicitly out of sight of any observer. While other activities take place in dispersed locations within the surrounding countryside, some distance from the ‘town’. The foddering boy appears to have travelled by cart to feed the cows, and the sheep are being taken ‘homeward’ by the shepherd ‘through the dreary day’. Because the poem does not represent a clear spatial and temporal relationship between beings, it is also difficult to determine how the different activities performed by them are related. Within the mixed-farming community described in Clare’s poem, different activities do contribute to a communal end: the cultivation of a basket of agricultural produce. The directing eye of the organising human mind is pointedly displaced though. (Significantly, the ‘farmer’ as manager does not feature in the Northborough sonnets.) Instead, the structure and subject matter of the poem implies the unmanaged cooperation that one finds in other supposedly less advanced species.

Discrete activities, described in separate vignettes, are performed by various (human) beings, all of whom are defined by their occupation (ploughman, thresher, foddering boy, milkmaid, shepherd, and so on). Each activity supports and is in turn supported by other activities. Some individuals will perform more than one role, as in insect colonies. The cooperative system suggested by Clare’s poem is close to the original etymological definition of stigmergy: ‘a mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents and actions’ (Marsh and Onof, p. 136). Activities do not need to be performed at the same time or in the same place to function together within a system characterised by stigmergy. Of necessity, stigmergy also involves moments of coordinating and reinforcing social interaction between individuals. The ‘environment’ within a stigmergic system is the mechanism whereby the commitment of colony or community members is reinforced through the social support and approval of other colony or community members. This environmental reinforcement mechanism is represented in many of the Northborough sonnets. Again, as Kövesi observes, they often move from representations of various kinds of labour or work through ‘active [reinforcing] sociability towards evening, towards dinner, towards bed’ (p. 102). The term ‘stigmergy’ was first used to describe coordination between apparently simple agents supposedly without intelligence or memory. More recently, striking parallels between the ways various species of non-human being, especially insects, and humans (in numerous fields of human endeavour) work together have been identified (Marsh, pp. 213–14; Lavoie, pp. 27–8). Indeed, human organisational systems defined by stigmergy are usually held to be more efficient than those which are not. Of course, the identification of such parallels has proven controversial, even within academia, because there is still resistance to the idea that the anthropocentric humanist boundary between humans and other animals is not quite as secure as we like to think. E.O. Wilson, most responsible for many of our ideas about insect-colony collaboration, and for the development of the discipline of socio-biology to explain human behaviour and cooperation, feared that this would be the case (p. 13).

In the experimental Northborough sonnets that represent non-human (wild) animals in the landscape, the disruption of the anthropocentric rational-visual ‘mastery’ of space enables an immersive Humboldtian exploration of different ways of being in the world. If we were to accept human sight as ‘merely’ the equal of, and in many instances unequal to, those other senses tailored to the world as experienced by non-human animals, we would be better able to understand Derrida’s remark that ‘a de-hierarchisation of the senses displaces what we call the real, that which resists all appropriation’ (2005, p. 156). Kövesi’s reading of ‘The shepherds almost wonder where they dwell’ explores the way the poem represents the disruption of sight in mist or fog, and the consequent displacing of various characters’ awareness of the spatial relations between them (pp. 107–17). Although Clare’s ‘old dog for his night journey stares’ (1995, p. 67), it goes without saying that many canines do not rely primarily on sight, and, far from ‘levelling […] perspective’ across species lines (pp. 114–15), the mist would not have the same impact on the non-human animals that rely chiefly on other senses. This reading is still driven by the anthropocentric hierarchy of the senses that privileges sight because humans rely on it to ‘master’ the world around them. Either smell, hearing, touch or taste can be the main sense for non-human animals, and some possess very different senses not found in humans, for example the snail’s statocysts or the frog’s lateral-line receptors. (As Cary Wolfe suggests, ‘does it make sense to say that the ring-tailed lemur “does not see” the object of the bat’s echolocation? [Or] that a starfish “does not see” the image of an insect’s compound eye?’ (p. 133).) In sonnets such as the following, we are taken into the hidden worlds of beings that we habitually recoil from as ‘different, foreign, and exotic’ (Perkins, pp. 5–7), that experience the world very differently from humans, and that would rarely feature in a visually rationalised prospect of the landscape:

The early snail slow paced & never brief

Has done a journey on the cabbage leaf

The old sows out & crawling on the trees

Rolls up as soon as touched and turns to peas

The maiden early starts away from bed

The spider clicks like watches oer her head

She milks the cows & sets the buckets down

& pulls the [thorns] that tear her gown

The shepherd journeys early with his dog

Who frights the startled bird & sniffs the frog

& pulls the grass & whistles like a bird

The blackbirds chirp & answer from the yard

The boy with merry face & horses come[s]

Pelts & fills his pockets full of plumbs (Clare, 1995, p. 29)

The decentred observing eye, disarticulated from a rationalising human subject, takes us on a tour of diverse and spatially dispersed habitats. In the opening couplet, the word ‘journey’ is used to describe the snail’s movement across the leaf, forcing an immediate immersion within the snail’s ‘perspective’. We unthinkingly assume that a journey is only a journey if it is on a scale that is consistent with the human experience of the world. Clare’s sonnet clearly intimates that snails’ daily navigation of their very different world is just as deserving of the appellation. The speaker’s observation that the snail’s ‘journey’ is ‘never brief’ suggests that it is not a short excursion, and that it is not lacking in consequence (from the snail’s perspective). The snail’s world is made up of intricate networks of vegetation. This terrain is at least as, if not more, complex and unpredictable than that which humans traverse in their day-to-day lives, even when journeying to more remote places outside of their normal routine. Given the constant threat from predators, including encounters with giant humans like Clare’s speaker (several hundred times their size), the journeys of snails, and even sows (woodlice), prodded just to see them curl up into ‘peas’, are truly epic in kind. We now know much more about the behaviour of the snail, and Clare’s suggestion that they plot their way around their environment has been demonstrated in recent research. James Atkinson’s work on land-snail biology confirms that snails do alter direction in response to changes in the chemical make-up of their environment (p. 332). New research on British garden snails also indicates that they have the ability to find their way back to a preferred (home) foraging site, if they are transferred to a new location, as long as it is not too far away (Dunstan and Hodgson, pp. 7–8). One has to bear in mind that the snail’s world is smaller, though no less intricate, than that of humans, so what might not seem like a great distance to us, would be a world away to a snail. Clare’s sonnet is not so suggestive regarding the way in which the spider, frog and blackbird experience their worlds. The principal feature of this sonnet though is that the speaker’s disarticulated observing eye facilitates transitions in perspective/scale, and immersion within a diverse range of habitats, revealing the extraordinary adaptability of many non-human animals. Frogs are masters of both water and land (they are less visible in their terrestrial homes), spiders can be found in a diverse range of habitats, including, as is the case here, the inside of human dwellings, and blackbirds are perhaps the most adaptable and resourceful of British songbirds.

The speaker’s close-up Humboldtian immersion within the hidden habitats of neglected or taken for granted (by humans) non-human beings also reveals that they communicate in some distinct species-specific ways. Humans generally view the capacity for complex communication as a uniquely human trait. As Niklas Luhmann observes, however, ‘humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication [systems] can communicate’ (p. 169). In other words, human language is just one of an infinite number of possible systems of communication. Significantly, none of the humans represented in Clare’s sonnet are engaged in communication, but two of the non-human species are: ‘the spider clicks’ and ‘the blackbirds chirp’, receiving ‘answer from the yard’. Spiders produce various sounds (in some species a clicking sound) to communicate, using objects in their environment or stridulation. Songbirds communicate through their song – this is, or should be, more obvious in the case of the blackbird’s complex and varied song than in the song of many other species. The blackbird’s ‘answer’ is symbolic because the idea that animals are incapable of complex reciprocal communication has been questioned. Derrida has demonstrated that all systems of communication (including human language and the various systems used by other species) depend for meaning upon what he calls différance (the difference between discrete signs in a system, and the [infinite] deferral of meaning). In Margins of Philosophy (1982a), Derrida defines différance as ‘the movement according to which language or any code, [or] system of reference in general is constituted “historically” as a weave of differences’ (p. 12). Even Noam Chomsky, once an adamant proponent of human exceptionalism when it comes to language, has changed his position, contending:

the available data suggests a much stronger continuity between animals and humans with respect to speech than previously believed. We argue that the continuity hypothesis thus deserves the status of a null hypothesis, which must be rejected by comparative work before any claims of uniqueness can be validated. For now, this null hypothesis of no truly novel traits in the speech domain must stand. (Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch, p. 1574)

This is the view of many post-humanist thinkers, most prominently Haraway, who remarks:

Hauser and his colleagues […] belong to a tribe of comparative cognitive scientists and neurobiologists who have […] demolished that lame figure of difference. […] It is no longer possible scientifically to compare something like ‘consciousness’ or ‘language’ among humans and non-human animals as if there were a singular axis of calibration. (p 235)

Sonnets such as ‘The early snail slow paced & never brief’ suggest that non-human beings are also self-aware and consciously interact with the world around them. The snail undertakes a ‘journey’ (a word that indicates decision-making on the move, even planning), while the spider is ‘watching’ the maiden (considering a next course of action depending on her movements, or merely out of curiosity), and the blackbirds are engaged in interactive dialogue. All are captured during transitional moments when they will need to make decisions about their immediate future, suggesting a degree of awareness and acumen, even in beings that humans typically dismiss as completely lacking in intelligence. Interspersed with non-human beings consciously interacting with the world, there are humans unthinkingly engaged in apparently routine activities. Clare’s suggestive insight regarding animal intelligence would have been controversial in his day but has been proven by developments in the science of animal cognition; for example, recent studies have demonstrated that snails are capable of associative learning and can form long-term memories (in fact the molecular make-up of the snail’s brain is not that different from the human brain) (Roubos). It could be argued that, because non-human beings are captured during moments of conscious behaviour, an inferior fragmented consciousness is implied. This position breaks down in the face of recent developments in psychology and the philosophy of mind. Several influential thinkers specialising in consciousness have argued persuasively that it is necessarily fragmented, and that the idea of a coherent human identity is a myth.

At a given moment in time, an individual’s identity (their sense of self or meaning in their life) is always dependent on context that is ‘at once material, bodily, external, institutional, technological, and historical’ (Wolfe, p. 12). Of course, when identity is considered from a non-anthropocentric perspective, most, if not all, of these categories apply to other species of being too. In Derrida’s words, each iteration of a life is ‘pure difference, which constitutes the self-presence of the living present, [and] introduces into self-presence from the beginning all the impurity putatively excluded from it. The living present springs forth out of its non-identity with itself and from the possibility of a retentional trace. It is [in fact] always a trace’ (1973, p. 85). Derrida’s insight has implications for the still prevalent idea that we possess a unified autobiographical identity (or personhood) which is reflected in human language/s; the idea that, as Robert Sokolowski argues, ‘our rationality is exhibited and our personhood is made manifest in our ability to use the first-person pronoun’ (p. 10). For Derrida there can be ‘no subject who is agent, author, and master of différance […] Subjectivity, like objectivity, is an effect of différance’ (Derrida, 1982b, p. 28). In other words, an individual’s subjectivity is a product of language rather than vice versa, and subjectivity is also fragmentary due to the way communication systems in general work. This iterative version of human subjectivity is implied by the fragmentary identity of the putative speaker in many of Clare’s experimental Northborough sonnets, which, like other formal, rhetorical and thematic features of the poems, suggests that Clare was alive to at least some of the many inconsistencies inherent within humanist exceptionalism. It is not necessary to assert that Clare was a proto-deconstructionist to argue that he could detect mythical thinking and double standards in the way humans see and represent themselves in relation to other/non-human beings.