Response

The stimulus asks for a poem that simply inhabits a state — that deepens rather than diagnoses — and the retrieval has answered not with Marvell but with Clare, which is a rougher and more honest fit. Marvell's enclosed gardens are philosophically self-conscious about their enclosure; they know they are making an argument for withdrawal and they make it beautifully. Clare's commons are not enclosed in that sense — they are enclosed in the other sense, the parliamentary one, the sense that destroyed them. "Here was commons for their hills, where they seek for freedom still, / Though every common's gone and though traps are set to kill" — Clare. What the stimulus wants, I think, is a poem that inhabits beauty without ironizing it, and what the corpus has returned is a poem that cannot do this because the beauty has been materially removed. The inhabitation and the loss are the same sentence. Clare doesn't withdraw into a garden; the garden was taken while he was standing in it. And the Johnson prose passage, arriving from a completely different century and genre, performs exactly the manoeuvre the stimulus is testing: Johnson describes the poet who "guides the unhappy fugitive, from want and persecution, to plenty, quiet, and security, and seats him in scenes of peaceful solitude and undisturbed repose" — Johnson. The poet's job, in Johnson's formulation, is to produce the inhabitation that politics has foreclosed. The politician proposes remedies that will never be enacted; the poet enacts the remedy that was never proposed. This is not naivety. It is a division of labour between the real and the imagined that Johnson states with full knowledge of its cost.

What the oblique strategy asks — what is this poem afraid of — has an unusually literal answer in Clare. "Remembrances" is afraid of the plough. "All levelled like a desert by the never weary plough" — Clare. The plough is not metaphorical. It is the instrument that converted common land to private agriculture under enclosure, and Clare watched it happen to the specific hills and nooks he names: Sneap Green, Puddock's Nook, Hilly Snow. The poem's long tumbling lines, with their piled clauses and internal rhymes, are doing something the stimulus's request for inhabitation clarifies: they are trying to hold the place in the sentence the way the place can no longer be held in the world. The syntax refuses to stop because stopping means arriving at the present tense where everything is gone. And Clare's "To a City Girl" — "Here fields are gardens, free for all" — repeats the word the enclosures abolished: free. The invitation to paradise is issued from a landscape that has already been fenced. Clare is not choosing withdrawal. He is remembering access. The difference matters enormously. Marvell's garden is a philosophical proposition; Clare's commons were a legal fact that became a philosophical absence. The poem that simply inhabits a state turns out to be the poem that has lost the state it inhabits — and the inhabitation is the grief, not the alternative to it.