"Mild health I seek thee": Clare and Bloomfield at the limits of pastoral

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Authors
Lafford, Erin
Affiliation
University of Derby
Issue Date
2020

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Abstract
In The Country and the City (1973), Raymond Williams dismantled the “pastoral assumption” that the rural laboring class were pictures of health and vitality, uncovering instead the reality of embodied suffering in laboring-class poetry. This essay considers how Robert Bloomfield and John Clare interrogated this “pastoral assumption” of rural health, suggesting that to claim they merely rejected it risks losing sight of their subtle forms of poetic critique. The body, mind, and verse of laboring-class poets were subject to simultaneous cultural narratives of robust health and sickly weakness, within which Bloomfield and Clare had to forge their own distinctive poetic voices. They wrote poems, I argue, that ostensibly upheld a pastoral ideal of health emanating from the natural world, but also critiqued this ideal through an artful hesitancy, especially in their use of apostrophe. I consider the influence of Bloomfield’s “To My Old Oak Table” (1806), and “Shooter’s Hill” (1806) on Clare’s early poem “To Health” (1821) and one of his middle-period sonnets in particular. Far from being uncomfortable or under-confident in the pastoral mode, Bloomfield and Clare brought their own aesthetic experiments and experiences of precarious health to bear on some of its key tropes.
Citation
Lafford, E. (2020). "Mild health I seek thee": Clare and Bloomfield at the limits of pastoral'. European Romantic Review, 31(5), pp. 1-23.
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Journal
European Romantic Review
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10545/625012
DOI
10.1080/10509585.2020.1803547
Additional Links
https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/gerr20/current
Type
Article
Language
en
ISSN
1050-9585
EISSN
1740-4657
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