Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Unheard Swarms: John Clare and Romantic Entomology

2020; Temple University Press; Volume: 51; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/710208

2640-7310

Michael Nicholson,

Plant and animal studies

Previous articleNext article FreeUnheard Swarms: John Clare and Romantic EntomologyMichael NicholsonMichael NicholsonMcGill University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWhat wonder strikes the curious while he viewsThe black ants city by a rotten treeOr woodland bank—in ignorance we musePausing amazd we know not what we seeSuch government & order there to beSome looking on & urging some to toilDragging their loads of bent stalks slavishly& whats more wonderful—big loads that foilOne ant or two to carry quickly thenA swarm flocks round to help their fellow menSurely they speak a language wisperinglyToo fine for us to hear & sure their waysProve they have kings & laws & them to beDeformed remnants of the fairy days—John Clare, “The Ants” (EP 2:56)“The Ants,” a sonnet in John Clare’s second published volume of poetry, The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems (1821), represents a “curious” entomological observer whose experience of “wonder” gives way to “amazd” musings. Clare’s collective, unknowing voice, “we know not what we see,” reflects how natural facts about insects were becoming associated with “wonder,” awe, and amazement during his day.1 Referencing traditions of medieval romance and the rise of modern entomology, “The Ants” captures what I call “Romantic entomology”: a poetics encompassing ordinary facts and extraordinary adventures, marked most prominently by the publication of English entomologists William Kirby and William Spence’s Introduction to Entomology (1815–26) and Swiss entomologist Pierre Huber’sRecherches sur les mœurs des fourmis indigènes (1810), translated as The Natural History of Ants (1820).2 While the 1790s were defined by Erasmus Darwin’s attention to botany, Clare’s time saw the formation of the Entomological Society of London (1833) along with the publication of landmark studies, including John Curtis’s 16-volume British Entomology (1824–39) and James Francis Stephens’s 12-volume Illustrations of British Entomology (1828–46). While Alan Bewell points out that Clare’s abandonment of a planned “Natural History of Helpstone ‘Biographys of Birds & Flowers’ with an Appendix on Animals & Insects” (Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare [hereafter NHP] 26) demonstrates the poet’s “belief that poetry was the proper medium” for natural description (275), Clare reimagines the role of the poet-entomologist adopted by Thomas Gray, writing verse continuous with Romantic entomology.3Although Clare has been identified as a natural historian and descriptive poet who finds poems in the fields, “The Ants” reads as a found poem from Huber’s, Kirby’s, and Spence’s natural histories of insects.4 The sonnet’s diction, “city,” “government & order,” “toil,” “laws,” “help their fellow men,” reimagines Huber’s entomology, which asks, “Have they chiefs, a government, a police?” before describing “little architects” and “labourers” who “yield mutual assistance; living, in common, upon the provision the workers bring in” (xxi, 17, 125, 362). As one of Clare’s notes on ants reveals, it is difficult to distinguish the poet’s entomological reading from his own verses on insects and natural historical observations. Antsdont hurd for winterthe account in Gerard a lietake their youg higher in wet& lower in drytravel one waygo a great distancecarry home insectspay great attention to their eggs & youg(NHP 262)These fragments, which could be a descriptive poem or Clare’s entomological field notes, likely derive in part from Huber on “maternal attention” in “Of the Eggs, Larvæ, and Pupæ of Ants,” a chapter of Natural History (60). Huber, Kirby, and Spence also anticipate the first two lines of “The Ants”; Introduction to Entomology notes that examination of the species disproves the “fable” that “ants store up grain in their nests” (2: 45).While Clare’s prose notes correct the “lie” of an early modern botanist, “The Ants,” like Kirby and Spence’s Romantic entomology, also acknowledges the apparently impossible task of knowing everyday facts: “in ignorance we muse.” Figuring ordinary insects as baffling the human senses, “too fine for us to hear,” Clare challenges anthropocentric theories of perception.5 His entomological imaginary accords well with that of George Samouelle’s Entomologist’s Useful Compendium (1819), which relays how the perceptual powers of insects exceed those of the microscope and human senses:Leeuwenhoek reckons in each eye of the Libellula, or Dragon-fly, 12,544 lenses, or in both 25,088; the pictures of objects painted thereon must be millions of times less than the images of them pictured on the human eye. There is no doubt that insects still smaller have eyes adapted to discern objects some thousands of times less than themselves. (21)Romantic-era entomologies pointed out that “it is not improbable” that insects, “so essentially different from any other class of animated beings, possess senses of which we have no idea” (Wakefield 10).6 As James Rennie’s Insect Miscellanies (1831) emphasized, since “physical differences” prohibit human access to insect senses, “we can seldom ascertain the facts with minute accuracy”; while analogy explains the elephant trunk in terms of human touch, it fails to elucidate the perceptual significance of the “ichneumon fly vibrating its long antennae before the entrance of a bee’s nest” (1–2).7Evoking the entomological emphasis on alternative forms of sensory awareness, the distributed and multiplied view of Clare’s Shepherd’s Calendar reenvisions the well-known entomological anecdote referenced above, Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s finding that to the “6236 optical organs or eyes” of a silkworm moth, “the great tower or steeple of our new church in Delft, which is three hundred feet high, and about seven hundred and fifty feet distant from my house, … appeared no larger than the point of a small needle” (1: 62).8 Clare’s poem, which refers to a shepherd “marking oft” the insects “climbing up the rushes stem / A steeples height or more to them” (“July,” lines 37, 41–42), figures an insect vision capable of encompassing the human world. Reenvisioning “the rushes stem” as but “A steeples height or more,” The Shepherd’s Calendar displays Clare’s understanding of how the “wonderfully diminutive” multiple eyes of insects translate human forms into their perceptual terms (1: 62). Playing on the discovery of the compound eyes of insects, Clare’s poem reverses allegory’s traditional appropriation of nonhuman bodies for human purposes.Taking a cue from Clare’s editor, John Taylor, who advertised the poet’s “provincial expressions” as documenting “the unwritten language of England” (xvi), this essay explores how Clare’s entomological verse records the unheard swarms of England—the creaturely communications of the insect world. In turning to the Romantic entomologies of Huber and his peers, Clare cultivates an antennal poetics capable of receiving ostensibly unknown and unintelligible worlds—a radically sensitive ecological awareness attuned to insect intelligence.9Clare’s sonnet’s reference to the “language” of ants—the prompt for what this essay terms his antennal poetics—likely alludes to what Huber called “antennal language,” a form of expression defined by insect signals and the rapid communication of information.10 According to Huber, deciphering antennal language “would require, without doubt, deep study, should we be desirous to ascertain every impression which it is susceptible of communicating” (209).11 While Clare’s natural history note entitled “On Ants” (c. 1824–25) describes insect communication using the sensory analogies that Rennie critiques, the text also admits uncertainty through a series of similes: “I have often minded that two while passing each other woud pause like old friends long seperated & as if they suddenly reccolectd each other they went & put their heads together as if they shook hands or saluted each other” (NHP 111–12).12 This vision of recollecting, saluting ants—here puns, “often minded,” “put their heads together,” align human and nonhuman forms of cognition and communication—also displays Clare’s likely awareness of Huber’s well-known experiments on “relation between ants.” Demonstrating that ants acknowledge one another after months of separation, Huber contended that they possess the abilities to remember and embrace: “The ants … recognised their former companions; fell to mutual caresses with their antennæ” (172).Drawing on Huber’s depictions of ants as expressing “fear or anger” by means of hurried motion and “gentle blows with their heads” (146), Kirby and Spence also represent the species as capable of “communicating” general distress:That ants, though they are mute animals, have the means of communicating to each other information of various occurrences, and use a kind of language which is mutually understood, will appear evident from the following facts. If those at the surface of a nest are alarmed, it is wonderful in how short a time the alarm spreads through the whole nest. It runs from quarter to quarter; the greatest inquietude seems to possess the community; and they carry with all possible dispatch their treasures, the larvæ and pupæ, down to the lowest apartments. (2: 59)Figuring ant language as motion, as an alarm that “runs from quarter to quarter,” commentators such as Kirby and Spence engaged what Heather Keenleyside terms the “sense that animal motion is a kind of speech, and that this speech is something that one can see” rather than hear (202). Revising and romanticizing existing theories of creaturely communication, Kirby and Spence describe a mobile “inquietude”—a cryptic “kind of language which is mutually understood” by ants but not humans.13 In accord with this view, Clare’s sonnet sketches a collective human “we” defined by an uncertain vision: “in ignorance we muse.”Since “The Ants” repurposes up-to-date entomological knowledge, the poem’s open secret is the omission of a direct reference to antennal language. The speaker’s “Surely they speak a language wisperingly / Too fine for us to hear & sure their ways / Prove they have kings” not only tells an entomological joke—Huber’s wonderful “republics” of ants are governed by queens not kings (362)—but also draws on scientific discussions of information transmission by means of contact.14 Building on Huber’s linguistic theory of antennal “contact” (177), Kirby and Spence imagined the insect voice that Clare’s sonnet represents as whispering: “If we are of opinion that all sounds, however produced, by means of which animals determine those of their own species to certain actions, merit the name of voice; then I will grant that insects have a voice” (2: 375).15Clare’s “Too fine for us to hear” parallels Kirby and Spence’s discussion of the limits of the human senses: “That pleasure or pain makes a difference in the tones of vocal insects is not improbable; but our auditory organs are not fine enough to catch all their different modulations” (2: 393; emphasis mine). The insensitive and unreceptive human senses that Kirby, Spence, and Clare portray have an additional pathos in relation to Huber’s claim that ants “know how to impart information to insects, not of their own species,” including aphids and gall insects (210).16 Taken together, Clare’s writings on ants demonstrate how he returns to the otherworldly forms of expression, reception, and sensation that Romantic entomology discovered in insect antennae, contact, and movement.As Clare’s sonnet shows, the linguistic insights of Romantic entomology remain surprising even today. Tobias Menely’s account of “creaturely voice” (20), for example, comes up against the historical use of the term “voice” as applying less well and often to insects than to birds or animals. As Aristotle’s depiction of voice as “the impact of inbreathed air against the ‘windpipe’” implies (qtd. in Menely 24), Romantic entomology’s alternative models of signification—less entangled in the morphologies of higher-order animals—might more accurately capture the communicative powers of insects.The sensitive powers of Clare’s antennal poetics also address the long-standing cultural connections between the enigmatic otherworlds of insects and romance.17 Clare’s Village Minstrel (1821) reflects the strong entomological interest in links between the miniscule forms of insects and fairies.18 Besides figuring fairies as flying insects—“Those mites of human form like skimming bees / That flye & flirt about but every where”; “The fly like tribes … / That thro a lock hole even creep wi ease” (Early Poems of John Clare [hereafter EP] 2: 127)—Clare’s poem depicts a peasant poet, Lubin, who moves between natural historian and mythologist:No inscet scapt him from the gaudy plumesOf dazzling butterflyes so fine to viewTo the small midgen that at evening comesLike dust spots dancing oer the waters blue / … /& he has markt the curious stained ringsTho seemly nothing in anothers eye& bending oer em thought em wonderous thingsWhere nurses night fays circling dances hie(EP 2: 143)Lubin’s attentive rural eye marks unnoticed entomological and romantic forms, “dazzling butterflyes” and “wonderous things.”19Besides depicting beelike fairies that “creep” through locked holes, Clare’s poem casts the peasant poet and his environment in terms of the actions of insects and fairies; Lubin imitates insect motion in order to avoid the “Dread monsters fancy moulded on his sight”: “Soft woud he step lest they his tread shoud hear / & crept & crept” (EP 2: 129). Lubin’s creeping here associates the rural rhymer with the movements of insects: “To move with the body prone and close to the ground, as a short-legged reptile, an insect, a quadruped moving stealthily” (OED, s.v. “creep,” def. 1a). As Clare’s poem suggests, the Romantic era was marked by the emergence of the term “creepy,” one of several pejorative terms that, according to Eric C. Brown, define insects by means of their “locomotions and six-leggedness,” as “‘creepy’ and ‘crawly’” (xi).20In The Village Minstrel, not only does the peasant poet attune to and imitate motions of objects of his natural historical inquiries—“Twas his … pastimes lonly to pursue / Wild blossoms creeping in the grass to view”—but insect action characterizes movements of the world itself (EP 2: 131). Clare’s poem renders ecological processes such as the progress of morning and evening—“the sun creeps up the hill behind”; “the blue eve crept deeper”—in terms of the “stealthy” creeping of the insect world that the poem later describes (EP 2: 132, 133): “his fond enquirey usd to trace / Thro natures secrets wi unwear[i]ed eye / … / The inscet creeping” (EP 2: 150–51). With the term “trace,” “To follow, pursue” (OED def. 5b), Clare here figures the “fond enquirey” of any entomological observer as following the “creeping” motions of insects.While Clare’s antennal poetics likens “natures secrets” to romantic charms and furtive fairies, Romantic entomologists similarly represented themselves as accurate imaginers working in an enchanting field. While Kirby and Spence’s preface nods to the “genuine charms” of the field (vi), the preface to Curtis’s British Entomology recounts how the “beauty” of unclassified winged insects solicits the entomologist “to pay attention to those splendid little Fairy-forms” (1: 3, 4).21 Taken together, their works figure the entomologist as revealing nature’s open secrets; the cabinet of insects displays impossible “forms in endless variety … exceeding even the wildest fictions of the most fertile imaginations” (1: 12).22Toward these ends, Kirby and Spence emphasize how “very minute species” of insects, particularly those approaching “the extreme limits of visibility,” challenge the senses (3: 41). Clare, Kirby, and Spence often cast insects as hidden in plain sight—as silent observers and overlooked life forms whose insignificance, ephemerality, and invisibility are possibly the result of adaptive vanishing acts. Besides associating fugitive winter flies with concealment and “hidy holes,” The Shepherd’s Calendar relates how “Insects as small as dust are never done / Wi glittering dance” (“February,” line 125; “June,” lines 3–4). If Clare’s antennal poetics instructs readers to distinguish insects from atmosphere—the poem’s dancing “Insects as small as dust” recall The Village Minstrel’s “small midgen that at evening comes / Like dust spots dancing”—Kirby and Spence’s entomological imaginary teaches readers to notice insects as they would punctuation. Aligning the work of the insect with the syntactical force of the diminutive end stop, Introduction to Entomology portrays a beetle as “absolutely not bigger than the full stop that closes this period” (3: 41).23Clare’s insect worlds constitute instances of what Siobhan Carroll has recently termed “atopias”: so-called “blank” geographical spaces that “were imagined as harboring within themselves marvelous unknowns such as the deep sea and the inner earth, but also as resisting, because of their climate or material character, their conversion into colonizable forms of space” (5, 6).24 Counting what Anne-Lise François might call the “uncounted experience” of the insect (xv), Clare refuses to formulate landscapes full of insects as empty or barren. Immersed in these nearly imperceptible worlds (undetected unless they impinged on the agricultural interest) S. W. Millard’sOutlines of British Entomology, In Prose and Verse (1821) establishes a consonance between obscure insects and entomological verse: “The author has been told that insects are very little known, and therefore that poetry upon them is likely to be uninteresting from its obscurity” (xvi). Redefining entomological worlds as “marvelous unknowns,” Millard’s volume represents insects as overlooked in terms of status, beauty, and agency. According to Millard, Britain’s myriads of insects discover the secret work of pollination that ensures the survival of humans:25’Tis simply mine with careful heed to traceHow Insect-life repletes this vacant space;How Insects claim by birth, as Nature’s dow’r,Each plant neglected, each neglected flow’r.(192)Rewriting so-called useless wastes as essential, Millard discovers an insect birthright, “claim by birth,” to ostensibly “vacant space” that escapes the notice and dominion of “Man supreme and chief o’er all the earth” (190). Defined by furtive escapes, nonhuman agency, and hidden knowledge, the far-from-blank domains of “Insect-life” prompt the poet and the entomologist to “heed” other “neglected” organisms—to reenvision wild flora as always already occupied, attractive, and dynamic.Almost all entomological treatises and textbooks from the period began with a romantic defense of the field.26Introduction to Entomology envisions the entomologist as a knight challenging the “champions of romance”: “Since, therefore, the merits of Entomology have been so little acknowledged, you will not deem it invidious if I advocate the cause of this distressed damsel, and endeavour to effect her restoration to her just rights” (1: 2). Here entomology becomes a quest to rescue a “distressed damsel.”27 Unlike established branches of natural history, the emerging field of entomology positioned itself in the enchanted terms of poetry; no less than William Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads, Romantic entomologists represented themselves as making the familiar unfamiliar, discovering romance in England’s everyday fields and forests.Romantic entomologists cast the study of insects as offering experiences in alternative worlds and points of view.28 While Joseph Albernaz rightly points out that Clare’s insects “form their own local and particular world,” calling into question an anthropocentric poetics seeking “to unify everything into a coherent whole” (195), Clare’s references to the “insect world,” though a poetic commonplace, themselves possibly derive from Romantic entomology. Kirby and Spence characterize insect habitats as captivating “worlds”: “one of the most remarkable characters of the insect world, is the little space they occupy” (3: 40).Extending the “obscurity” of the insect world to themselves, Romantic entomologists characterized ants and beetles as possessing the qualities ostensibly differentiating the scientist from the insect. Kirby and Spence called for entomologists to attend to the intense “love of wasps for their young” and the “parental love” of bees (1: 368, 376).29 Clare’s depiction in “The Ants” of how “a swarm flocks round to help their fellow men” notably reimagines Kirby and Spence’s portrait of “Affection of Insects for their Young,” specifically the weather-wise “working ants” who “rouse their companions, whom they strike with their antennae, or, … drag with their jaws to the summit till a swarm of busy labourers fill every passage. These take up the larvæ and pupæ, which they hastily transport to the upper part of their habitation” (1: 331, 359). The poet’s entomological insights thus depart from James Thomson’s representations of the idea that “the central motive of animal communication is mating: the ‘voice of love’ is granted to ‘birds and beasts’ alike”; “The pressure of sexual selection even requires that the ‘arts of pleasing’ be ‘inventive’” (Menely 112).Like Clare’s ant architects and dreaming butterflies, the insects of Introduction to Entomology sport, communicate, travel, and wage war:30I have matter enough to fill the rest of this letter with interesting traits, while I endeavour to teach you their language, to develop their affections and passions, and to delineate their virtues;—while I show them to you when engaged in war, and enable you to accompany them both in their military expeditions and in their emigrations,—while I make you a witness of their indefatigable industry and incessant labours,—or invite you to be present, during their hours of relaxation, at their sports and amusements. (2: 58–59)Kirby and Spence here present a historical version of Evelyn Fox Keller’s twentieth-century claims that “good science” requires “a deep emotional investment on the part of the scientist,” while modern biology calls for “an intimate knowledge, made possible by years of close association with the organism” observed (198). Romantic entomology imagines the role of the reader as “a witness” or companion “to accompany them”; the entomologist, by contrast, takes the role of host, “invite you to be present,” or insect informant, “teach you their language.”If Kirby and Spence envision the insect and entomologist as communicating, Clare’s poetic experiments go further, reversing the points of view assigned to the insect and the nature poet (or entomologist).31The Shepherd’s Calendar understands the insect as looking rather than being looked at, as inquiring subject rather than passive object of study:Others journying too and froThrong the grassy woods belowMusing as if they felt and knewThe pleasant scenes they wandered throWhere each bent round them seems to beA hugh and massive timber treeWhile pismires from their castles comeIn crowds to seek the litterd crumb(“July,” lines 47–54)32Clare’s references to romantic insect “castles” and visions, “musing as if they felt and knew / The pleasant scenes,” reveal how he engages what Brownlow terms the notion of an “infallible artistry” rooted in affection (125).While Kirby and Spence explore insect “noises” produced “under the influence of the passions; of fear, of anger, of sorrow, joy, or love” (2: 376), Clare’s “December” alludes to the affective bliss of the insect world: “The flowering ale is set to warm / Mirth full of joy as summer bees” (lines 92–93). In “August,” Clare anticipates this comparison of merrymaking men to summer bees—“flowering ale,” “full of joy,”—by reworking John Gay’s reduction of insects to allegory in “The Lady and the Wasp.” In Gay’s fable, an allegorized “Beauty”—the Lady—spars with a wasp who “by repulse … bolder grew, / Perch’d on her lip and sipt the dew” of her “cherry lips” (25, 27). Clare’s “August” reimagines Gay’s urbane lady—and foppish, “giddy wasp” (26)—as a laboring-class maiden and a common country wasp:By fondling swain the maid wi heaving breastUpon her lovers shoulder leans at rest…Each swain soaks hard—the maiden ere she sipsShrieks at the bold whasp settling on her lipsThat seems determined only hers to greetAs if it fancied they were cherrys sweet(lines 117–18; 121–24)Unlike Gay’s fable, Clare’s poem clearly distinguishes “bold whasp” from “fondling swain.” Transforming an allegorical wasp into an actual one, The Shepherd’s Calendar represents an insect seeking beer-soaked lips, “As if it fancied they were cherries sweet.” Gesturing toward the modern forms of insect affect and imagination that Kirby and Spence envisaged, Clare dispenses with the stock lover’s complaint of fable.Reducing the sexuality of Gay’s fable to an incidental pair of lips marking an insect’s figurative desire for cherries (and actual attraction to liquor), Clare reinterprets the Lady’s lips as a form of animal mimicry; seen through the eyes of the wasp, they imitate the cherry fruit. “August” further revises Gay’s allegorical insect kiss into a euphemistic expression of desire signaled by insect motion: “settling on her lips.” Clare subtly substitutes the intentional advance of the wasp’s movement, “seems determined only hers to greet,” for Gay’s concluding anthropomorphic sting, “she found / That wasps have stings, and felt the wound” (28).Such a romantic project, seeking to represent impassioned and affectionate insects, required the revision of insect instinct. The first paper published in The Transactions of the Entomological Society of London, a transcript of an 1834 paper read by Spence, calls readers’ attention to the “neglected” topic of “the metaphysics of entomology, or an investigation of the limits which bound their instincts on the one hand, and that small portion of mind and reason which few will deny them, on the other” (1: 1–2; emphasis original). Echoing Clare’s references to imperceptible insect intelligence and remarkable human “ignorance” in “The Ants,” Spence solicits his fellow scientists to address “vague and inconclusive” commentaries on animal reason, including Darwin’s failure to distinguish “species altogether distinct” (1: 2). While William Smellie’s Philosophy of Natural History (1790–99) defined reason as motion and mind as “the power of moving,” arguing that “the reasoning faculty itself is a necessary result of instinct” and “imitation necessarily implies some degree of intelligence” (1: 131, 145, 469), John Ware’s revised 1824 edition further romanticizes Smellie’s account, representing insects as possessing “a more wonderful display of instinct and intelligence, than any other of the invertebral animals” (68).Clare’s natural history notes reveal the allure of Smellie’s and Ware’s natural romances and related revisionary concepts of instinct. Rewriting mindless instinct as “wonderful” intelligence, Clare comments:The instinct of the animal world is a most wonderful faculty & not to be accounted for its conclusions are nicer then mathematical acurasy it seems even to be stronger then human reason for the human mind to be perfect in any art which it chuses to follow is obligd to undergo a long & laborius instruction (NHP 91)The instinct of the snail is very remarkable & worthy notice tho such things are lookd over with a carless eye—it has such a knowledge of its own speed that it can get home to a moment to be save from the sun as [a] moment too late woud be its death—as soon as the sun has lost it[s] power to hurt in the evening it leaves its hiding place in search of food which it is generally aware were to find (NHP 65–66)33The “remarkable,” “wonderful,” and inexplicable nature of animal instinct, which “may not properly be defined in words,” bolstered many of the period’s romantic depictions of insect life as astonishingly unaccountable (NHP 91). Taking a cue from Romantic entomology, Clare reimagines insect instinct as an inscrutably precise form of “knowledge,” “nicer then mathematical acurasy”—and a perfecting force, “stronger then human reason.” Elsewhere he identifies the “mystery” of animal instinct as no “less worthy of discovery than the greatest” scientific findings of Newton (NHP 267–68).Brownlow’s argument that Clare’s “insects are heirs to an instinctive joy” that “can almost be called an aesthetic dimension” (125) can be extended to encompass links between insect intuition and artistry that Romantic entomologists were simultaneously theorizing. No less than the ingenious, imitative plants that Kelley’s account of Romantic botany describes, Clare’s insects present “a material invitation to figure,” crossing the line ostensibly dividing biological and literary forms (Kelley 13). The poet’s meditations on the wings of a hummingbird hawkmoth, for instance, recount his mistaking of the insect for a bird: “I had read of humming birds & was childish enough almost to believe this one.” Uncertain of the scientific name of this “beautiful Sphinx,” Clare calls the insect “the english humming bird” as a result of its “thick down resembling feathers” and “fan tail exeactly like a birds in minature” (NHP 104). Kirby and Spence even present the insect world as capable of figuring the all-encompassing concepts of atmosphere, earth, water, and art: “Nature, in her sportive mood, when painting them, sometimes imitates the clouds of heaven, at others, the meandring course of the rivers of the earth, or the undulations of their waters; many are veined like beautiful marbles; others have the semblance of a robe of the finest net-work thrown over them” (1: 10).34 As Clare, Kirby, and Spence imply,