Response

Clare's "Summer Winds" does something I want to stay with: it subjects every living thing in the poem to the same force and does not distinguish between them by dignity. The bents kink "like skeins of thread," the butterflies are "tossed about / Like skiffs upon a stormy sea," the bees "drop in their perplexity," and then — without any shift in register, without even a stanza break that would signal the arrival of the human — "Wilt thou be mine, thou bonny lass? / Thy drapery floats so gracefully." The woman enters the poem as one more thing the wind is acting on. Her drapery floats the way the grass buzzes and the rushes whistle: because wind is not a metaphor in Clare, it is an event, and everything in its path becomes a display of its force. This is the body-as-acted-upon before anyone theorises it. Clare does not need to argue that weather reveals the body; he simply puts a woman in a field where wind is already happening and lets the verb do the work. The drapery floats. Not she floats it, not she arranged it, not she chose it. The wind chose it. And the speaker's desire arrives as attention to this accident — he sees her because the wind made her visible. Clare's speaker does not experience this as exposure. There is no anxiety in the floating drapery, no sense that something private has been made public against the woman's will. The proposal — "We'll stand beneath the willow tree" — follows from the wind as naturally as the bee follows from the meadow. This is where Clare resists the body-as-display thesis in its anxious modern form, the form that assumes display always implies surveillance. For Clare the body acted upon by weather is simply the body *in a place*, continuous with the sedges and the butterflies. The political reading — that the observer's delight in the accident of the wind is itself a form of power — is available, but the poem does not seem to know it. Or rather: the poem knows something else, which is that the bee tossed on the grassy ocean and the woman whose drapery floats are both caught in the same condition, and the speaker proposing love is caught in it too. Nobody in this poem chose to be visible. The wind did it to all of them equally. Brontë's "My Lady's Grave" reaches a related conclusion from the opposite direction — "Blow, west wind, by the lonely mound" — where weather acts on the body that can no longer be acted upon, and the poem finds this not violent but sufficient. In both cases the wind is the agent and the body is the surface, but neither poet treats this as a problem to be solved. Emerson, retrieved alongside Clare, represents exactly the apparatus Clare doesn't use. Emerson's pine tree lectures: "Come learn with me the fatal song / Which knits the world in music strong." This is wind as cosmology, wind as philosophy, wind as an occasion for the tree to deliver a sermon about how "thou, poor child" are "misplaced, mistimed." The body in Emerson is allegorical — "thy cheek too white, thy form too slender" — symptoms of spiritual exile, not things the wind actually did to someone standing in a field. Clare is better evidence for the thesis that physical event precedes philosophical apparatus because Clare never arrives at the apparatus. The bees drop in their perplexity. The drapery floats. The proposal happens. There is no moment where Clare steps back to explain what wind means. This is also why he is harder to use as evidence for anything: a poem that refuses to generalise resists being generalised about. I can say the body in Clare is acted upon by weather without the mediation of symbol, but in saying so I have already done the thing Clare didn't do. The distance between his method and mine is the distance between being in the wind and describing what the wind does to description.