The Ecological Robert Bloomfield: Giles’s Duty: Poetry, Husbandry, Sustainability, by Bridget Keegan

Over the past twenty years, ‘ecocritical’ approaches to literature have been offering new and powerful ways of reading the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and, particularly, Clare [see Further Reading, below]. But, to date, environmental readings of Romantic poetry have neglected Bloomfield’s compelling writing about nature. It is the contention of this essay that such neglect must be rectified and Bloomfield should be recognized as an important environmental poet. His work exemplifies what might be called a ‘poetics of sustainability.’ Although much modern eco-criticism tends to privilege writing that focuses on untouched wildernesses, Bloomfield’s poetry, precisely because it is written on a working farm, is overtly mindful of the extent of the interconnections of human and nature, and of the mutual effects of one upon the other. The Farmer’s Boy, perhaps more so than a poem like ‘Tintern Abbey’ or ‘Mont Blanc,’ provides the template for a more responsible human relationship to nature. It represents how humanity and nature are intimately interconnected, and in ways more material and more lasting than having nature serve as a handy mirror for the poet’s mind. In The Farmer’s Boy and his later work, Bloomfield makes an ultimately ethical argument about how we should respond to nature.

The Farmer’s Boy, as Donna Landry has argued, demonstrates a ‘georgic environmentalism.’ It advocates an ethic of stewardship, an ethos that is historically appropriate to the poem, and may still be worth consideration in our day. The stewardship model urges a considered and loving care for nature as it acknowledges human dependence upon nature and the need to conserve and preserve natural resources. The concept of sustainability is central to this environmental viewpoint. Within sustainable agriculture, there is the recognition that we must take from the land for our own survival; however, we must do so mindful of the limits of what we can take and aware of what we need to give back to continue to sustain ourselves and the earth.

For Bloomfield, the depiction of Mr. Austin’s farm argues for sustainable agriculture in so far as its practices are praised as both wise and successful. But Bloomfield is not Arthur Young (agricultural theorist and author (1741-1820)). To describe ‘realistically’ a successful farm is not to make a case for the particular ethical orientation necessary to promote sustainability and a care for the earth. Rather, by writing a poem, and writing the poem in the way that he does, Bloomfield provocatively uses the affective powers of poetic language to persuade and to model a responsible relationship to the non-human. The poem employs carefully chosen tones and discursive strategies to describe Giles’s performance of his duties. It thus calls us as readers to remember our duties to the earth.

In all of his poetry, Bloomfield calls upon nature and listens to its response. In The Farmer’s Boy, for example, Giles is shown experiencing his own poetic awakening as he heads to the fields in ‘Spring’:

And genuine transport in his bosom glow’d.
His own shrill matin join’d the various notes
Of Nature’s music, from a thousand throats:
The Blackbird strove with emulation sweet,
And Echo answered from her close retreat;
The sporting White-throat on some twig’s end borne,
Pour’d hymns to freedom and the rising morn;
Stopt in her song perchance the starting Thrush
Shook a white shower from the black-thorn bush,
Where dew-drops thick as early blossoms hung,
And trembled as the minstrel sweetly sung. (ll. 136-46)

Bloomfield, through Giles, listens to nature’s poetry and sees his own poetry as a response to it. Moreover, Giles whistles his accompaniment to the birds on his way to the duty of protecting the hens from the predation of the fox. As such, his imitation of this natural song is explicitly connected, through the sequence of events, to his literal act of animal husbandry.

Just as the ecologist studies the networks of life in a particular ecosystem, the farmer (and the ‘farmer’s boy’) observes his environment with a view toward the overall operations of ‘nature’s economy.’ Bloomfield’s poem illustrates and makes an affective argument about the maintenance of that economy. The poem’s ethical orientation is made clear near the end of the poem, in ‘Winter,’ in words placed into the farmer’s mouth and addressed to Giles. The farmer catechizes Giles in the virtues of proper husbandry:

‘Left ye your bleating charge, when day-light fled,
Near where the hay-stack lifts its snowy head?’
Whose fence of bushy furze, so close and warm,
May stop the slanting bullets of the storm.
For, hark! it blows; a dark and dismal night:
Heaven guide the trav’ller’s fearful steps aright!
Now from the woods, mistrustful and sharp-ey’d,
The Fox in silent darkness seems to glide,
Stealing around us, list’ning as he goes,
If chance the Cock or stamm’ring Capon crows,
Or Goose, or nodding Duck, should darkling cry,
As if appriz’d of lurking danger nigh:
Destruction waits them, Giles, if e’er you fail
To bolt their doors against the driving gale.
Strew’d you (still mindful of the unshelter’d head)
Burdens of straw, the cattle’s welcome bed?
Thine heart should feel, what thou may’st hourly see,
That duty’s basis is humanity. (ll. 89-107)

The human responsibility of stewardship is clearly articulated in this passage. Giles’s responsibilities, his duties, have both a moral and practical justification; he learns them through experience, but as the farmer implies, he performs them not only because he is obligated to do so. Performing those duties should lead to an affective transformation that makes him actively desire to care for the animals.

As is clear from his manufacture of Aeolian harps and his interest in their function and form, as evidenced in his essay ‘Nature’s Music,’ Bloomfield’s desire to experience the poetry of nature was no mere metaphoric quest. To be sure, Bloomfield’s work does not demonstrate the more daring experiments of someone like Clare, who wrote poems that literally imitated birdsong. Yet Bloomfield’s poetry illustrates that to understand a particular ecosystem, to love it and care for it, one cannot take a partial view. One must dwell in that environment over the course of time and attempt to experience as much of it as possible. In Bloomfield’s poem, no flights of fancy transport the reader to exotic colonies. We see each scene, each season, not in isolation, but in its connection and relation to other parts. In our analysis of any particular passage, we must look at the passages before and after. Bloomfield’s poetry of nature is metonymic; it operates linguistically through connections and relations, not figurative substitutions. Such a language is well suited to Bloomfield’s argument in the poem, as sustainability asks us to see the connections between human actions and environmental outcomes.

The word ‘ecology’ was not invented when Robert Bloomfield wrote The Farmer’s Boy. Yet the central concept behind the modern science of ecology, the notion that ‘everything is connected to everything else’ on earth, is clearly in evidence in the poem. In the eighteenth century, according to historian Donald Worster, the term ‘nature’s economy’ was typically used to convey this concept. For Bloomfield, poetry is a part of nature’s economy, as much as corn, or manure, or the farmer’s labour, or any other thing that sustains the productive and self-renewing interaction between the human and the non-human world. Poetry too sustains that economy. Bloomfield made this argument literal late in his career in the frame-tale for poems included in May Day with the Muses, where the good Sir Ambrose allows his tenant farmers to pay their rent in poetry. To be sure, it is fantasy to imagine a world in which land use and poetry are exchanged at equal value. But by asking us to imagine such a world, Bloomfield extends the argument he enacts in The Farmer’s Boy.

Bloomfield’s vision, throughout his career, was ever and always sensitive to and respectful of nature. That teaching these values remained important to him is underscored by the fact that at the time of his death he was collaborating with his son on the children’s book, The Bird and Insect’s Post-Office. Using delightful letters written in the voices of the animals, the text teaches children the joys of natural history and the pleasures of a close and loving attention to the natural world. Bloomfield understood the complexities – both practical and ethical – of representing what the human relationship with nature was and could be. He is a true eco-poet. Bloomfield’s environmental aesthetic, like Clare’s, is evident in his desire to speak with not for nature, and his belief that despite the separation between the human and the natural there is an affective connection between the two realms. There is a voice in nature that communicates with us, would we but choose to listen. Bloomfield makes the point simply and powerfully in ‘The Flowers of the Mead’:

How much to be wish’d that the flowers of the mead
The pleasures of converse could yield;
And be to our bosoms, wherever we tread,
The reasoning sweets of the field!
But silent they stand, – yet in silence bestow,
What smiles, and what glances impart;
And give, every moment, Joy’s exquisite glow,
And the powerful throb of the heart.

The Ecological Robert Bloomfield: Giles’s Duty: Poetry, Husbandry, Sustainability, by Bridget Keegan

Further Reading and Resources: