Unheard Swarms: John Clare and Romantic Entomology

Previous articleNext article FreeUnheard Swarms: John Clare and Romantic EntomologyMichael NicholsonMichael NicholsonMcGill University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWhat wonder strikes the curious while he viewsThe black ants city by a rotten treeOr woodland bank—in ignorance we musePausing amazd we know not what we seeSuch government & order there to beSome looking on & urging some to toilDragging their loads of bent stalks slavishly& whats more wonderful—big loads that foilOne ant or two to carry quickly thenA swarm flocks round to help their fellow menSurely they speak a language wisperinglyToo fine for us to hear & sure their waysProve they have kings & laws & them to beDeformed remnants of the fairy days—John Clare, “The Ants” (EP 2:56)“The Ants,” a sonnet in John Clare’s second published volume of poetry, The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems (1821), represents a “curious” entomological observer whose experience of “wonder” gives way to “amazd” musings. Clare’s collective, unknowing voice, “we know not what we see,” reflects how natural facts about insects were becoming associated with “wonder,” awe, and amazement during his day.1 Referencing traditions of medieval romance and the rise of modern entomology, “The Ants” captures what I call “Romantic entomology”: a poetics encompassing ordinary facts and extraordinary adventures, marked most prominently by the publication of English entomologists William Kirby and William Spence’s Introduction to Entomology (1815–26) and Swiss entomologist Pierre Huber’sRecherches sur les mœurs des fourmis indigènes (1810), translated as The Natural History of Ants (1820).2 While the 1790s were defined by Erasmus Darwin’s attention to botany, Clare’s time saw the formation of the Entomological Society of London (1833) along with the publication of landmark studies, including John Curtis’s 16-volume British Entomology (1824–39) and James Francis Stephens’s 12-volume Illustrations of British Entomology (1828–46). While Alan Bewell points out that Clare’s abandonment of a planned “Natural History of Helpstone ‘Biographys of Birds & Flowers’ with an Appendix on Animals & Insects” (Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare [hereafter NHP] 26) demonstrates the poet’s “belief that poetry was the proper medium” for natural description (275), Clare reimagines the role of the poet-entomologist adopted by Thomas Gray, writing verse continuous with Romantic entomology.3Although Clare has been identified as a natural historian and descriptive poet who finds poems in the fields, “The Ants” reads as a found poem from Huber’s, Kirby’s, and Spence’s natural histories of insects.4 The sonnet’s diction, “city,” “government & order,” “toil,” “laws,” “help their fellow men,” reimagines Huber’s entomology, which asks, “Have they chiefs, a government, a police?” before describing “little architects” and “labourers” who “yield mutual assistance; living, in common, upon the provision the workers bring in” (xxi, 17, 125, 362). As one of Clare’s notes on ants reveals, it is difficult to distinguish the poet’s entomological reading from his own verses on insects and natural historical observations. Antsdont hurd for winterthe account in Gerard a lietake their youg higher in wet& lower in drytravel one waygo a great distancecarry home insectspay great attention to their eggs & youg(NHP 262)These fragments, which could be a descriptive poem or Clare’s entomological field notes, likely derive in part from Huber on “maternal attention” in “Of the Eggs, Larvæ, and Pupæ of Ants,” a chapter of Natural History (60). Huber, Kirby, and Spence also anticipate the first two lines of “The Ants”; Introduction to Entomology notes that examination of the species disproves the “fable” that “ants store up grain in their nests” (2: 45).While Clare’s prose notes correct the “lie” of an early modern botanist, “The Ants,” like Kirby and Spence’s Romantic entomology, also acknowledges the apparently impossible task of knowing everyday facts: “in ignorance we muse.” Figuring ordinary insects as baffling the human senses, “too fine for us to hear,” Clare challenges anthropocentric theories of perception.5 His entomological imaginary accords well with that of George Samouelle’s Entomologist’s Useful Compendium (1819), which relays how the perceptual powers of insects exceed those of the microscope and human senses:Leeuwenhoek reckons in each eye of the Libellula, or Dragon-fly, 12,544 lenses, or in both 25,088; the pictures of objects painted thereon must be millions of times less than the images of them pictured on the human eye. There is no doubt that insects still smaller have eyes adapted to discern objects some thousands of times less than themselves. (21)Romantic-era entomologies pointed out that “it is not improbable” that insects, “so essentially different from any other class of animated beings, possess senses of which we have no idea” (Wakefield 10).6 As James Rennie’s Insect Miscellanies (1831) emphasized, since “physical differences” prohibit human access to insect senses, “we can seldom ascertain the facts with minute accuracy”; while analogy explains the elephant trunk in terms of human touch, it fails to elucidate the perceptual significance of the “ichneumon fly vibrating its long antennae before the entrance of a bee’s nest” (1–2).7Evoking the entomological emphasis on alternative forms of sensory awareness, the distributed and multiplied view of Clare’s Shepherd’s Calendar reenvisions the well-known entomological anecdote referenced above, Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s finding that to the “6236 optical organs or eyes” of a silkworm moth, “the great tower or steeple of our new church in Delft, which is three hundred feet high, and about seven hundred and fifty feet distant from my house, … appeared no larger than the point of a small needle” (1: 62).8 Clare’s poem, which refers to a shepherd “marking oft” the insects “climbing up the rushes stem / A steeples height or more to them” (“July,” lines 37, 41–42), figures an insect vision capable of encompassing the human world. Reenvisioning “the rushes stem” as but “A steeples height or more,” The Shepherd’s Calendar displays Clare’s understanding of how the “wonderfully diminutive” multiple eyes of insects translate human forms into their perceptual terms (1: 62). Playing on the discovery of the compound eyes of insects, Clare’s poem reverses allegory’s traditional appropriation of nonhuman bodies for human purposes.Taking a cue from Clare’s editor, John Taylor, who advertised the poet’s “provincial expressions” as documenting “the unwritten language of England” (xvi), this essay explores how Clare’s entomological verse records the unheard swarms of England—the creaturely communications of the insect world. In turning to the Romantic entomologies of Huber and his peers, Clare cultivates an antennal poetics capable of receiving ostensibly unknown and unintelligible worlds—a radically sensitive ecological awareness attuned to insect intelligence.9Clare’s sonnet’s reference to the “language” of ants—the prompt for what this essay terms his antennal poetics—likely alludes to what Huber called “antennal language,” a form of expression defined by insect signals and the rapid communication of information.10 According to Huber, deciphering antennal language “would require, without doubt, deep study, should we be desirous to ascertain every impression which it is susceptible of communicating” (209).11 While Clare’s natural history note entitled “On Ants” (c. 1824–25) describes insect communication using the sensory analogies that Rennie critiques, the text also admits uncertainty through a series of similes: “I have often minded that two while passing each other woud pause like old friends long seperated & as if they suddenly reccolectd each other they went & put their heads together as if they shook hands or saluted each other” (NHP 111–12).12 This vision of recollecting, saluting ants—here puns, “often minded,” “put their heads together,” align human and nonhuman forms of cognition and communication—also displays Clare’s likely awareness of Huber’s well-known experiments on “relation between ants.” Demonstrating that ants acknowledge one another after months of separation, Huber contended that they possess the abilities to remember and embrace: “The ants … recognised their former companions; fell to mutual caresses with their antennæ” (172).Drawing on Huber’s depictions of ants as expressing “fear or anger” by means of hurried motion and “gentle blows with their heads” (146), Kirby and Spence also represent the species as capable of “communicating” general distress:That ants, though they are mute animals, have the means of communicating to each other information of various occurrences, and use a kind of language which is mutually understood, will appear evident from the following facts. If those at the surface of a nest are alarmed, it is wonderful in how short a time the alarm spreads through the whole nest. It runs from quarter to quarter; the greatest inquietude seems to possess the community; and they carry with all possible dispatch their treasures, the larvæ and pupæ, down to the lowest apartments. (2: 59)Figuring ant language as motion, as an alarm that “runs from quarter to quarter,” commentators such as Kirby and Spence engaged what Heather Keenleyside terms the “sense that animal motion is a kind of speech, and that this speech is something that one can see” rather than hear (202). Revising and romanticizing existing theories of creaturely communication, Kirby and Spence describe a mobile “inquietude”—a cryptic “kind of language which is mutually understood” by ants but not humans.13 In accord with this view, Clare’s sonnet sketches a collective human “we” defined by an uncertain vision: “in ignorance we muse.”Since “The Ants” repurposes up-to-date entomological knowledge, the poem’s open secret is the omission of a direct reference to antennal language. The speaker’s “Surely they speak a language wisperingly / Too fine for us to hear & sure their ways / Prove they have kings” not only tells an entomological joke—Huber’s wonderful “republics” of ants are governed by queens not kings (362)—but also draws on scientific discussions of information transmission by means of contact.14 Building on Huber’s linguistic theory of antennal “contact” (177), Kirby and Spence imagined the insect voice that Clare’s sonnet represents as whispering: “If we are of opinion that all sounds, however produced, by means of which animals determine those of their own species to certain actions, merit the name of voice; then I will grant that insects have a voice” (2: 375).15Clare’s “Too fine for us to hear” parallels Kirby and Spence’s discussion of the limits of the human senses: “That pleasure or pain makes a difference in the tones of vocal insects is not improbable; but our auditory organs are not fine enough to catch all their different modulations” (2: 393; emphasis mine). The insensitive and unreceptive human senses that Kirby, Spence, and Clare portray have an additional pathos in relation to Huber’s claim that ants “know how to impart information to insects, not of their own species,” including aphids and gall insects (210).16 Taken together, Clare’s writings on ants demonstrate how he returns to the otherworldly forms of expression, reception, and sensation that Romantic entomology discovered in insect antennae, contact, and movement.As Clare’s sonnet shows, the linguistic insights of Romantic entomology remain surprising even today. Tobias Menely’s account of “creaturely voice” (20), for example, comes up against the historical use of the term “voice” as applying less well and often to insects than to birds or animals. As Aristotle’s depiction of voice as “the impact of inbreathed air against the ‘windpipe’” implies (qtd. in Menely 24), Romantic entomology’s alternative models of signification—less entangled in the morphologies of higher-order animals—might more accurately capture the communicative powers of insects.The sensitive powers of Clare’s antennal poetics also address the long-standing cultural connections between the enigmatic otherworlds of insects and romance.17 Clare’s Village Minstrel (1821) reflects the strong entomological interest in links between the miniscule forms of insects and fairies.18 Besides figuring fairies as flying insects—“Those mites of human form like skimming bees / That flye & flirt about but every where”; “The fly like tribes … / That thro a lock hole even creep wi ease” (Early Poems of John Clare [hereafter EP] 2: 127)—Clare’s poem depicts a peasant poet, Lubin, who moves between natural historian and mythologist:No inscet scapt him from the gaudy plumesOf dazzling butterflyes so fine to viewTo the small midgen that at evening comesLike dust spots dancing oer the waters blue / … /& he has markt the curious stained ringsTho seemly nothing in anothers eye& bending oer em thought em wonderous thingsWhere nurses night fays circling dances hie(EP 2: 143)Lubin’s attentive rural eye marks unnoticed entomological and romantic forms, “dazzling butterflyes” and “wonderous things.”19Besides depicting beelike fairies that “creep” through locked holes, Clare’s poem casts the peasant poet and his environment in terms of the actions of insects and fairies; Lubin imitates insect motion in order to avoid the “Dread monsters fancy moulded on his sight”: “Soft woud he step lest they his tread shoud hear / & crept & crept” (EP 2: 129). Lubin’s creeping here associates the rural rhymer with the movements of insects: “To move with the body prone and close to the ground, as a short-legged reptile, an insect, a quadruped moving stealthily” (OED, s.v. “creep,” def. 1a). As Clare’s poem suggests, the Romantic era was marked by the emergence of the term “creepy,” one of several pejorative terms that, according to Eric C. Brown, define insects by means of their “locomotions and six-leggedness,” as “‘creepy’ and ‘crawly’” (xi).20In The Village Minstrel, not only does the peasant poet attune to and imitate motions of objects of his natural historical inquiries—“Twas his … pastimes lonly to pursue / Wild blossoms creeping in the grass to view”—but insect action characterizes movements of the world itself (EP 2: 131). Clare’s poem renders ecological processes such as the progress of morning and evening—“the sun creeps up the hill behind”; “the blue eve crept deeper”—in terms of the “stealthy” creeping of the insect world that the poem later describes (EP 2: 132, 133): “his fond enquirey usd to trace / Thro natures secrets wi unwear[i]ed eye / … / The inscet creeping” (EP 2: 150–51). With the term “trace,” “To follow, pursue” (OED def. 5b), Clare here figures the “fond enquirey” of any entomological observer as following the “creeping” motions of insects.While Clare’s antennal poetics likens “natures secrets” to romantic charms and furtive fairies, Romantic entomologists similarly represented themselves as accurate imaginers working in an enchanting field. While Kirby and Spence’s preface nods to the “genuine charms” of the field (vi), the preface to Curtis’s British Entomology recounts how the “beauty” of unclassified winged insects solicits the entomologist “to pay attention to those splendid little Fairy-forms” (1: 3, 4).21 Taken together, their works figure the entomologist as revealing nature’s open secrets; the cabinet of insects displays impossible “forms in endless variety … exceeding even the wildest fictions of the most fertile imaginations” (1: 12).22Toward these ends, Kirby and Spence emphasize how “very minute species” of insects, particularly those approaching “the extreme limits of visibility,” challenge the senses (3: 41). Clare, Kirby, and Spence often cast insects as hidden in plain sight—as silent observers and overlooked life forms whose insignificance, ephemerality, and invisibility are possibly the result of adaptive vanishing acts. Besides associating fugitive winter flies with concealment and The Shepherd’s Calendar how as small as dust are / lines If Clare’s antennal poetics to distinguish insects from poem’s dancing as small as The Village midgen that at evening comes / dust spots and Spence’s entomological imaginary to insects as they the of the insect with the of the Introduction to Entomology a as not than the that this (3: insect of what has that imagined as themselves such as the deep and the but also as of their or their into forms of what call the of the insect Clare to of insects as or in these they on the of British In Prose and (1821) a between insects and entomological “The author has been that insects are little and that poetry upon them is likely to be from its entomological as volume represents insects as overlooked in terms of and According to of insects the secret of that the of with to this claim by as each as an insect by to ostensibly that the and of and all the by furtive nonhuman and hidden knowledge, the of prompt the poet and the entomologist to other as and all entomological and from the with a romantic of the to Entomology the entomologist as a the of the of Entomology have been so little will not it if I the of this and to to (1: entomology a to a of natural the field of entomology itself in the terms of no less than William in Romantic entomologists represented themselves as the romance in everyday and entomologists cast the of insects as in alternative and points of While points out that Clare’s insects their own and into an anthropocentric poetics “to into a Clare’s to the though a themselves possibly derive from Romantic Kirby and Spence insect as of the most of the insect is the little they (3: the of the insect world to Romantic entomologists ants and as the ostensibly the from the Kirby and Spence called for entomologists to to the of for their and the of bees (1: Clare’s depiction in “The Ants” of how swarm flocks round to help their fellow reimagines Kirby and Spence’s of of for their the who their they with their antennae, … with their to the a swarm of every up the larvæ and pupæ, which they to the part of their (1: The poet’s entomological insights from James of the that “the of animal communication is the of is to and “The of even that the of be Clare’s ant and the insects of Introduction to Entomology and have enough to the of this with while I to their to their and and to their I them to engaged in and to them both in their and in their I a of their and to be during their of at their and (2: and Spence here a historical of that deep on the part of the while modern for knowledge, possible by of close with the Romantic entomology the role of the as or “to the by the role of to be or insect their Kirby and Spence the insect and entomologist as Clare’s experiments the points of view to the insect and the poet Shepherd’s Calendar the insect as looking rather than as rather than of and the as if they and they each bent round them seems to and from their to the lines to romantic insect and as if they and / The how he what terms the of an in Kirby and Spence insect the of the of of of or (2: Clare’s alludes to the of the insect “The is to / of as In Clare this of to of John of insects to in “The and the In an with a who … / on and the of Clare’s reimagines a and a the wi at at the on seems only to if it they were Clare’s poem from an into an The Shepherd’s Calendar represents an insect if it they were the modern forms of insect and that Kirby and Spence Clare with the of the of to an of an for to Clare the as a form of animal through the eyes of the they imitate the insect into a expression of by insect on Clare the of the only to for found / That have and the a romantic to represent and insects, the of insect The first published in The of the Entomological Society of a of an by Spence, attention to the of “the of entomology, or an of the limits which their on the one and that small of and which will on the other” (1: emphasis Clare’s to insect and human in “The Ants,” Spence solicits his fellow to address and on animal including Darwin’s to distinguish (1: While William of Natural History defined as motion and as “the of that “the itself is a result of and implies some of (1: John insects as more wonderful of and than any other of the natural history notes the of and natural and of as Clare of the animal world is a most wonderful & not to be for its are then it seems even to be then human for the human to be in any which it to is to a long & (NHP of the is & such are with a has such a of its own that it can home to a to be from the sun as woud be its as the sun has to in the evening it its in of which it is were to (NHP and of animal which not be defined in of the romantic depictions of insect life as (NHP a cue from Romantic entomology, Clare reimagines insect as an form of then a then human he the of animal as no of discovery than the scientific of (NHP that Clare’s are to an that be called an can be to links between insect and that Romantic entomologists were less than the that account of Romantic Clare’s insects to the ostensibly and forms The poet’s on the of a for his of the insect for a “I of birds & was enough to this of the scientific name of this Clare the insect “the as a result of its down and like a birds in (NHP Kirby and Spence even the insect world as capable of figuring the of and in imitates the of at the of the of the or the of their are like have the of a of the them” (1: As Clare, Kirby, and Spence

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