The Stream Invites Us to Follow by Dick Capel

Author:Dick Capel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Saraband
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

’Tis seen in flowers,

And in the mornings pearly dew;

In earths green hours,

And in the heaven’s eternal blue.

John Clare, from an 1873 poem

John Clare preceded Manley Hopkins by a few years and shared his reverential attitude to nature. Clare worked for much of his life as a farm labourer, gardener and lime burner, but suffered from depression and drank too much strong beer. He was eventually committed to an asylum, where he remained and continued writing for more than twenty years, until his death.

Clare witnessed sweeping changes in rural life as the industrial revolution tempted farm workers to leave the countryside for better paid jobs in towns and cities. Farms became mechanised, pastures were ploughed, woods and hedges cut down, marshland drained and commons enclosed. Clare hated this destruction. He was a brilliant naturalist with an astoundingly accurate knowledge of wildlife gleaned from hours of patient observation. His poetry was inseparable from his nature study. He said that he found his poems in the fields and “only wrote them down”. George Eliot once remarked that “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat and we should die of the roar on the other side of silence.” Poor John Clare must have heard distant undertones of that roar all his life.

Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Clare were both pioneers of the conservation movement who recognised the priceless vitality of nature. They were part of the artistic and intellectual Romantic Movement, which included Cumbria’s own William Wordsworth and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Other key literary figures included John Keats, Percy Shelley, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. They embraced nature, submitting to the full impact of their emotions, yielding to nature’s all-pervading aesthetic power.

I am not an expert in their poetry, but I do understand the deep connection the Romantics felt with nature. As a humanist I try to resist the word ‘spiritual’, but those special moments when I’m giving nature my undivided attention do equate to a ‘mind out of body’ experience. A sumptuous mass of pink and purple orchids swaying in a grassy hollow, a copper-red fox momentarily taken by surprise in a silent woodland glade, or a pair of bullfinches foraging along a hedgerow fill my heart and head with joy. I feel an emotional resonance that emanates from the elemental forces of nature, and absolute wonderment at nature’s beauty. The Romantics believed that too much science impairs the purity of that wonderment, and I’m inclined to agree with them. That may be a convenient attitude for someone like me, who has always found science too much like hard work, but, as the abstract artist Terry Frost said, “If you know before you look then you cannot see for knowing.”

Scientific knowledge is, of course, unequivocally a necessary part of the nature conservationist’s armoury and perfectly compatible with a sensory, heartfelt appreciation of wildlife. It’s just a question of prioritising our subjective

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