Thinking with Birds: John Clare and the Phenomenology of Perception

Abstract

John Clare's bird's nest poems create much of their dramatic interest by emphasising the vulnerability of the birds, the fragility of the eggs, and the interdependence of the surrounding ecosystem. This essay draws on concepts from French phenomenology to discuss the poet-speaker's embeddedness in a particular moment within that ecosystem and the extent to which his own vulnerability facilitates empathy with the birds he meets. Clare foregrounds the tension between pre-reflective processes, which Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls ‘operative intentionality’, and the categorical concepts or expectations that fail to account for these. He establishes the birds' own perceptive acts as part of what is given within operative intentionality, without claiming that his understanding is adequate to thinking with a bird or conceptualizing the delight of discovery. Jean-Luc Marion's concept of ‘saturated phenomenality’ provides a means of describing the surplus of what phenomenologists call ‘intuition’, to which Clare's bird's nest poems often attest.