John Clare's The Skylark addresses the issues of human pride, ignorance, and our exploitation of nature. The poem begins as a seemingly simple pastoral poem, with the first four lines doing not much other than describing a farm. However, as the poem progresses, Clare begins to use the skylark as a means to make commentary on the human condition.
The fifth and sixth lines start to unsettle the pretty picture Clare painted, referencing a hare who is aware of the "terrors" human activity can bring. Clare then begins describing a group of young boys who are going out to pick flowers. These boys are out to find pretty things that they can take away with them, separating the flowers from nature and probably ending in their death. Ballad is called to mind. However, they completely miss the beautiful Skylark, who the boys "unheeding past".
Clare juxtaposes the bird's gorgeous description in the 12th through 16th lines with the boys inability to notice it. It is important to note that Skylarks are somewhat dull looking when they are on the ground, but they are an incredible sight when flying and are able to soar to great heights. The boys are unable to notice this because they are focused only on the physical beauty of things like flowers.
In the last part of the poem, Clare raises questions about what humans would do if we could fly, and how we would probably behave differently from the Skylark. However, the skylark is safe in his nest and not even noticed by the boys passing by, unlike the hare at the start of the poem.He says we "would be too proud / And building on nothing but a passing cloud". These boys, and possibly humans in general, are both too prideful to build a nest on the ground,and too ignorant to see that the Skylarks adaptive mechanism is actually very effective.
What does this poem have to say about human pride? How does Clare use the bird as a tool to make a rhetorical argument?
Your final observation here is especially important: the poem is certainly an exploration of human pride (see line 21) and how it blinds us to the mechanisms by which birds (and perhaps nature more generally) survive and thrive. While the boys in the poem are botanizing, collecting specimens, the poem’s narrator is describing the way the hare camouflages itself. The split between the narrator’s perspective and that of the boys also ridicules the dreams of human observers of nature, especially those who imagine that birds are “as free from danger as the heavens are free / From pain and toil” (23-4). The poem’s narrator is thus drawing the reader’s attention to how we, as humans, project ideas from myth and religion onto the actions of the objects we encounter in the world, and as a result are completely oblivious to the “being” of the bird and of the conditions of the world that we live in. The split perspective suggests there are better and worse ways of observing and representing the object world—ways that are more “true” to nature and ways that are the product of unthinking violence and pride.
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