142 | JAMES CASTELL
Uttering John Clare’s Nonhuman Onomatopoeia
I
n what ways are Romantic poems a useful technology for thinking about human and nonhuman beings and their utterances? I want to start to ask this question by focusing on some examples from John Clare’s attempts to voice animals and to animalize the human voice in the early nineteenth century. That duality is very important because, as I will argue, when poets try to make animal utterances, they do not only appropriate animal voices. Instead, with an inevitable reciprocity, the voices of poets are also possessed by what they are trying to utter. In an 1820 poem, ‘Rural Morning’, Clare describes the sounds of a dawn scene. The ‘unfetter’d sun’ ‘wakes all life to noise & toil again’ and ‘Industrys bustling din once more devours / The soothing peace of mornings early hours’. Among the varied sounds, there is a dazzling series of animal utterances: The grunt of hogs freed from their nightly dens & constant cacklings of new laying hens & ducks & geese that clamorous joys repeat The splashing comforts of the pond to meet & chirping sparrows dropping from the eaves For offal curnels that the poultry leaves Oft signal calls of danger chittering high At skulking cats & dogs approaching nigh & lowing steers that hollow echoes wake Around the yard their nightly fast to break As from each barn the lumping flail rebounds In mingling consert with the rural sounds While oer the distant fields more fainter creep The murmuring bleetings of unfolding sheep