I feel that John Clare's "Ballad" is a simply named and short poem that encourages the reader to see beyond the initial and outward beauty of an object and see the inner turmoil and struggle that it had to go through to reach it's beauty. It is a sad yet optimistic view of the awareness of struggles and the movement to go beyond one's initial objectification of anything. It also makes a point to notify how short lived that initial outward beauty can be.
When "Ballad"begins, the speaker happens upon a "tender flower" (4) and notices how said flower appears to be "in pain" (7) and facing "life's endanger'd hour" (8) under the "wind and heavy rain" (5) of a storm. So the speaker comes across a "weedling wild" (1) but appears more concerned for the small object of beauty that has bloomed from the weedling and appears to be suffering and on the verge of death. The speaker has more concern for what would initially catch one's eye as beautiful, and seems to ignore the weedling that has given the flower the ability for life. In this sense, the speaker has objectified the plant as a whole by its one mark of beauty and has chosen to ignore the remainder of the plant. In placing this stanza first, Clare implies that most people would react like the speaker, and find the beauty facing adversity first and put their concerns towards that which appears most beautiful and most needy. So it is the speaker's reaction, and as Clare implies it would be most people's reaction, to attempt to save the most beautiful and needy thing first. Then the second stanza comes along and challenges the conventions that the speaker has been acting on.
In the second stanza, Clare gives the weedling life as it asks the speaker "wilt thou bid my bloom decay/And crop my flower, and me betray?"(9-10) and it accuses the speaker of being a "stranger so unkind" (14) that will "leave a shameful root behind/Bereft of all its pride"(15-16). So the weedling also considers its blooming flower to be the product or object of beauty that it has created, but it feels cheated to have it plucked away from its home so unfairly, taken away from what worked so hard to create it. It considers itself shameful compared to the beautiful flower it has produced, and it knows that once the flower is cropped, it will be in a perpetual state of decay, destined to die without its support system, the weedling, giving it life. In this sense, Clare is asking the speaker (and the reader) to realize that with each object of beauty there is a story of hard work and turmoil that created said object, that makes it more than just an object, it gives it character. To remove it from all of that hard work destines the object for withering death (as it will never achieve more beauty without the support system it has) or, at the least, the object is destined to stay an object as it is removed from its character. Meanwhile the source of character is left disturbed and saddened by the loss of all of its hard work. The most potent line of this stanza, however, is the alliterative middle line stating that "Its silence seemly sigh'd" (12). This one line reveals a few things. It illuminates the fact that in its silence, the weedling cannot defend itself or its flower, it is defeated knowing that its beauty will be removed. This leads one to believe that this has happened multiple times, and the weedling is defeated knowing it is ignored and its pleas would fall on deaf ears, for it is always the beautified object that is coveted, not the character that went into creating it.
This leads to the third stanza, in which the speaker's "heart did melt at its decline" (21) and the speaker tells the weedling, "thou gem divine/My fate shall stand the storm with thine/so took the root and all"(22-24) It is here that the reader sees Clare has given his speaker the heart enough to see beyond the initial beauty of the blooming flower, and the speaker has seen the beauty of the entire weedling. So the speaker brings the entire plant to be cultivated and given a safe, protected life. Clare's speaker identifies the character that goes along with the flower, the system of the weedling as a whole, and decides it is only right to save the entire plant and cultivate it so that it does not whither in sadness. The fact that the speaker's "fate shall stand the storm with thine"(23) implies that in taking the character and depth of the weedling, not just the objectified flower, the speaker is already more invested in the well being of the plant. In a similar sense when people objectify they care little for the character or the well being of what they are objectifying, but once they open up to the entire character behind an object and open themselves up as well people become more invested and the object suddenly moves beyond objectification. To what? Becoming part of the person that cares for it. Becoming a part of something greater, to be cared for and loved, not just objectified.
Further Questions:
How does the rhyme scheme and organization of the poem affect, if at all, this reading of the poem (particularly the rhyming middle and final lines of each stanza)?
What could one do with a Marxist reading of the poem? Is this perhaps a piece that Marx (or a marxist) could use in regards Capital or another work illustrating the distance our culture places between the finished product and those that toil to create said object?
Excellent reading of the poem, progressing through the stanzas—I was particularly struck by the way you isolate the flower as an allegory for a more general “object of beauty.” This is an astute reading of the poem, and I agree that the poem pushes us, the reader, to follow the speaker and move beyond our initial desire for the beautiful object. Your points develop the evolution of the speaker’s perspective from appreciation of the flower’s beauty to a more holistic recognition of the plant as a life form. This process or development is spurred by the act of personification in the second stanza, suggesting that personification is a device for producing empathy, but that it can work to expose objectification as much as produce it. The line “It’s silence seemly sighed” is indeed crucial in the poem: we might read it as the weedling’s recognition of the circumstances, or as a signal for the speaker’s recognition of his own work of imaginative projection. The alliteration in the line might be used to support either reading: the repeated sounds signal the repetition of the plucking but it might also introduce a bit of self-ironizing on the part of the speaker, who is drawing attention to his recognition that the flower only “seemed” to sigh as an effect of his personification of it. The question I might leave us with: is it necessarily better to transport the flower to a “safe” location? Does the poem admit to any dangers of domestication? These questions are pertinent considering Clare’s own life (which involved a forced, permanent stay in a sanitarium) and the difficulty he found in adjusting to a new location (his mental disorder seems to have been aggravated by his move away from Helpstone to a new cottage in Northborough).
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