Thank You

Plus: an essay elsewhere, and a note about forthcoming work

I wanted to take a moment and thank everyone who reached out to us after reading my post about Dominion’s plans to build a liquified natural gas storage facility in our area. We’ll be fine, I think. It’s seven miles away, and we’re not in the same watershed. A reader who works on state energy policy assures me that the deal is not finalized yet. That’s good news. It seems there’s still some hope that the thing won’t be built. 

This past week I started working on an essay on John Clare’s bird poems. I’ll post it here on the Substack in two installments. I’ll say much more about the man in a few weeks, but in brief,  Clare (1793-1863) was an agricultural laborer who wrote a truly ridiculous number of poems about the flora and fauna around Northamptonshire, where he lived his whole life. In his biography of Clare, Jonathan Bate counts around 3,500 poems written from 1814 to 1849, or around 100 per year (two per week for nearly every year of his life, if you do the math). My essay deals with a small cluster of sonnets he wrote about the native fowl of his region. Because I can’t write about all of these (dear reader, the critic can only try your patience for so long) I’ve appended one of the sonnets I don’t write about at the end of this post. Enjoy. Let me know what you think in the comments. 

A couple of items of note. I have an essay out in Comment magazine this week. If you read my Substack post about my family’s encounter with the kingfisher, you will have read the first third of this essay. But there’s lots more in there you haven’t read: a reflection on a myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; a reading of a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins; and a speculative reflection on the Christian doctrine of creation. It’s part of a recent effort of mine to think Christianly about animal life. In the worlds of ecology, theory, and environmentalism, many have called for new theories and ways of thinking about matter that restore vitality to the non-human world. It’s my conviction that a Christian doctrine of creation belongs to these ways of thinking. I have more on this topic in the pipeline (so to speak!). It requires digging into some medieval theological and literary texts I haven’t written about in some time, so please stay tuned. 

Here are some things I’ve enjoyed reading in the last week or so: Patricia Lockwood’s reflection on meeting Pope Francis (a friend, who is “typically outraged” by Lockwood, confessed that she found it funny); a review essay of two books on environmentalism as care work; a review essay by my old teacher, Paul J. Griffiths, on Jonathan Lear’s new book on mourning; and Jed Purdy’s reflection on the life and legacy of Raymond Williams. 

Last but not least, here’s the sonnet by Clare. Clare was self-conscious about his inability to spell and punctuate consistently. Please put aside such matters and enjoy a humble poem about a thrush.

The Thrushes Nest

Within a thick and spreading awthorn bush

That overhung a molehill large and round

I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush

Sing hymns to sunrise while I drank the sound

With joy and often an intruding guest

I watched her secret toils from day to day

How true she warped the moss to form her nest

And modelled it within with wood and clay

And by and by like heath bells gilt with dew

There lay her shining eggs as bright as flowers

Ink-spotted over shells of greeny blue

And there I witnessed in the summer hours

A brood of natures minstrels chirp and fly

Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky

An image of the song thrush, the species Clare writes about in his poem.