Reading up on Clare, who at one point in his life was in fact a gardener, it seems that with this poem he is trying to not only elicit a sympathetic response from the reader towards the firetail's plight, but to point out the defenselessness of these tiny birds in the face of human interference, especially when their eggs are involved.
Despite starting out in a fairly innocuous manner, the first lines of the poem introduce some measure of foreshadowing, with the robin 'tweeting' in line one while a cat creeps by its nest. Cats are natural predators of birds, hunting them for both food and sport, and even though the cat might be a threat to the chicks in the nest, the robin can't do much about it besides make noise and hope to distract the larger animal. This moment creates tension and parallels what happens in the second half in the poem. The bluecap in lines 3 and 4 'tootles in its glee' as it hunts for flies, which in and of itself is a fairly violent act at least if you're the fly. But for Clare, it seems that since it's natural, there is no reason to create a sense of concern, and in the lines following goes on to describe the chaffinch's mating call, 'urging its mate to utter pink again' in line 6.
However, the tone of the poem shifts, becoming more worrisome with the break in rhyming pattern between lines 7 and 8, where unless I was doing something wrong while reading, there was no way to rhyme 'trie' and 'melody' without really forcing it, and even then, it sounds awkward. Furthermore, besides forcing the reader out of the otherwise melodic rhyming scheme, Clare goes on to choose words that elicit a more melancholy mood, where the hedgsparrows in line 8 'stir' a 'shadowed melody,' while in line 9 'on the rotten tree the firetail mourns.'
Human interruption to the natural scene that had previously been illustrated is the cause of concern in the second half of the poem, where the firetail's eggs are under direct threat from feet or tools or thievery, if the hedger comes across them and decides to take them with him. There is nothing that the bird can do, because attempting to reach her eggs would result in her showing exactly where they are. All she can do as described in the final couplet is 'dreameth wrong, And pipes her 'tweet tut' fears the whole day long.'
The message Clare attempts to get across seems pretty obvious - that human intervention in nature's affairs disrupts the natural flow of things, especially when humans attempt to mold nature to their own aesthetic, as in the case of a gardener or a farmer. Based on this interpretation, I have a couple of questions that I feel might be interesting to discuss, besides whether or not anyone else got the same interpretation of this poem as I did:
- Clare seems to set up a difference between 'natural' disturbance to animal life (such as the cat and the bird eating flies) and 'unnatural' disturbances, in the case of the hedger. Are they really so far removed from one another? Is he trying to suggest that humans have no claim on the land that they live on, or is his stance less radical and more of an acceptance of Fate or some sort of higher power that controls what happens to which creatures and at whose hands?
- Looking up all the various creatures, I found that all of them except for the firetail itself are found throughout Europe. The firetail, however, is native only to Australia. Might this suggest that the bird was brought from its natural habitat and into an animal reservation/zoo-type space along with all of these European birds (a la Hunter's 'zoo'), and if so, how might that change the interpretation of the poem?
The emphasis on human intervention and the bird’s response to it is crucial to Clare’s agenda. As we discussed in class, you might extend your reading by considering what hedges signify in the first decades of the nineteenth century: they are divisions of property, and reflect the gradual disappearance of “common land” that laboring class people were free to cultivate for their own use. The hedger thus disrupts the “natural” conditions of life in a number of ways: by “filling a gap,” he is reinforcing new property relations that disenfranchise Britain’s working class, and he is doing it violently (we noted the repeated stresses and trochaic inversions in line 11: “Chopping the grain to stop the gap close by”). This goes some way toward answering your first question. On your second question, “firetail” is a colloquial name for the Redstart, a bird native to Britain. This might suggest that these new property relations signaled by the hedger are antagonistic to the “native” rights of Britons.
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