Funny Feelings in Nature

ABSTRACT

Funny Feelings and the Natural World, a panel convened for the joint NASSR/BARS conference at Edge Hill in August 2022, offered new ways of reflecting on the relation between human emotions and the environment. In contrast to the more sublime aesthetic categories and solemn moods that continue to dominate approaches to Romanticism and environmental criticism more broadly, we considered various forms of funny business in Romantic feelings towards the non-human world. This article develops some of the concerns of that panel, by engaging with current ideas in Romantic emotions, affect, and environmental literature. Our readings of John Clare and William Wordsworth suggest that both poets relay experiences of the non-human as funny in various senses and are inspired by the idea that poetic form is itself affective and a model of ecological thinking or feeling. Our enquiry attends to the Romantic period as a time not only when a new appreciation of the environment was emerging, but also different understandings of, and attitudes towards, the ludicrous took hold. ‘Funny’ here operates as it was understood at the time: as a compound of amusement and bemusement, and as a means of considering what the laughable and nature might share.

Funny Feelings and the Natural World, a special panel convened for the NASSR/BARS international conference at Edge Hill in August 2022, sought to offer new ways of reflecting on the relation between human emotions and the environment, and so might be considered part of an interjection in Romantic studies that some call affective ecology.¹ In contrast to the more sublime aesthetic categories and solemn moods with which we are all familiar, and that continue to dominate approaches to Romanticism and indeed environmental criticism more broadly, we considered various forms of funny business at play in Romantic feelings towards the non-human world. This was rooted in a belief that too often the laughable, and the odd, inexplicable, and unreadable have tended to be neglected or ignored. But what does it entail to approach the Romantic period and our own in terms of humor and strangeness given what we know the last 250 years have done to our planet? Should feelings, funny ones or not, come into it? Might they be roundabout ways of re-engaging with the life around us? Or, conversely, are they irrelevances, or—worse—out of keeping with ecological thinking? Do laughter and the laughable, for instance, enable us to feel more for all forms of life, or produce what Henri Bergson calls “a momentary anesthesia of the heart?” (64).

The panel’s concerns remain implicit in what follows as we engage with current ideas in Romantic emotions, affect, and environmental literature. The readings of John Clare (by Lafford) and William Wordsworth (by Ward), meanwhile, show how both poets are moved to present experiences of the non-human as funny in various senses, and are inspired by the idea that poetic form is itself affective, and has a vital role to play in the “ecology or interanimation of mind and world,” to borrow a phrase of Geoffrey Hartman’s (166). While each poet has encouraged some of the most stimulating ecocriticism over the years, they are frequently set in contrast because of what are perceived as their diverging approaches to nature. Most especially, there has been a tendency to read Clare’s attentive, detailed, and localized vision as more deeply ecological than what some have seen as Wordsworth’s egotistical and more abstract, or at least less particularized perspective.² Our interest in the funnier feelings nature inspires in these poets suggests things they might have in common for all their obvious differences, and, in the case of Wordsworth, reveals a poet amusingly aware of his own tendencies and those of some ecocritics who followed in his wake.

Focusing on funny feelings in nature is fitting given that the Romantic period was not only when a new understanding of the environment was emerging, but also different interpretations of, and attitudes towards, the ludicrous started to take hold. “Funny,” for instance, in the plural way we are using it here, emerges in the latter half of the eighteenth century: it meant something comical or humorous, but it also meant the unexpected, the peculiar, the downright bewildering. As Matthew Bevis has said, for many Romantics the funny was frequently a compound of amusement and bemusement (2). We, in turn, are interested in both forms of the funny, but most especially when they are at play together: when otherness or the enigmatic are met, but not quite answered or addressed, by an inclination to laugh, where laughter seems the only recourse towards the peculiar, springs out of it, or is a companion for or accompaniment to it.

We have decided to retain that charged word “nature” along with other terms such as ecological, non-human, and the environment, while recognizing that to do so is not without its problems. We know, for instance, that for critics such as Timothy Morton any exploration of how art represents the environment would be better doing away with the word altogether. “[N]ature,” he states, probably quite rightly, “is an arbitrary rhetorical construct, empty of independent, genuine existence behind or beyond the texts we create about it” (Ecology 21–22). It may be the case, too, that the baggage surrounding the word “holds us back from meaningful engagements with what, in essence, nature is all about: things that are not identical to us or our preformed concepts” (7). Yet these very issues may be why retaining the word continues to have value. As Jebediah Purdy puts it, “ideas about nature have been much more than rhetorical flourish or metaphysical gloss. They have deeply shaped the landscapes, economies, and social practices in which we continue to live” (21). Like Amelia Klein, then, we believe “that the way out is through” (108n16), and that to talk of nature might be a way to complicate the ideas, expectations, and associations that have built up around it. After all, both Clare and Wordsworth push at and question what counts as nature, and blur the boundaries between human and non-human life. Each poet helps us feel or recognize the uncertainty of all forms of nature, the otherness of the human and nonhuman. It is precisely because we do not see Romantics as “entering into harmony with the environment” in the sort of untroubled way Jonathan Bate once advocated (40) that retaining “nature” seems worthwhile, then.

Funny feelings and bad environmentalism

In their introduction to Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment (2018), Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino declare a need for ecocriticism to reckon with the emotions. In a contemporary Western culture where information and headlines about climate breakdown are available in a near-constant stream, and where “reading the news is never the task of a disembodied mind” (2), thinking about the relationship between feeling and place has become less about approaching the loving bonds of topophilia (to use Yi-Fu Tuan’s term), and more about receiving a continuous form of emotional onslaught: “A glance at headlines on any given day, with their reports of high fire danger, record temperatures, climate refugees, melting glaciers, extinct species, and abundant evidence of ‘global weirding’, can be unsettling, alarming, even paralyzing” (1–2). While Bladow and Ladino’s call for an affective ecocriticism offers a rich framework for making sense of what environmental issues feel like, and how environments themselves might shape our feelings and vice versa, they acknowledge the predominant forms such environmental (and environmentalist) affects might take. Theirs is a project where “Environmentalist killjoys,” by their own design, take “center stage,” and where “bad affects” such as melancholy, fear, anxiety, despair, grief, resignation, anger, and apathy are the emotional keynotes (15). It is not surprising that this should be so, given both the contemporary crises the essays in that collection seek to respond to, and the critical history of impassioned writing about environmentalism. Alex Lockwood, in a study of the “affective legacy” of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), for example, frames this seminal work of ecology and protest as heralding the vital personal and political work of feeling:

From under the surface of national life Silent Spring released private and localized feeling about the death of songbirds and destruction of nature … In doing so, it has established a template for campaigning science and environmental writing that approaches the making public of private feeling, and political agency, as actively enmeshed. (129)

What made Carson’s text so evocative is the quality of those private feelings made public, “everyday” (Lockwood 127) as they may be: it is a profound articulation of anger and grief at ecological destruction, and its elegiac impulse has, as Lockwood sees it, colored an ongoing tradition of environmental and nature writing that has to be mindful it does not lose the potency of Carson’s radicalism, lest it fall into passive resignation and despair (135).

Feeling “bad,” then, or the utterance of negative or despondent affects, has been argued as interwoven with the beginnings of environmentalism and its legacy as a contemporary movement and practice. This is an observation made strongly by Nicole Seymour (notably one of the contributors to Bladow and Ladino’s Affective Ecocriticism), with a view not only to finding a more flexible way of thinking about ecocriticism’s “bad” feelings, but also to expanding its emotional repertoire. Her Bad Environmentalism (2018) identifies a historically important but, at the same time, potentially alienating and repressive affective landscape of “emotional distress” surrounding both environmental degradation and the activism that seeks to redress it (4). Seeking to “reject the affects and sensibilities typically associated with environmentalism” such as “doom and gloom … guilt, shame, didacticism, prescriptiveness, sentimentality, reverence, seriousness, sincerity, earnestness, sanctimony, self-righteousness, and wonder” (4), might make one a “bad” environmentalist in Seymour’s terms, but as such it opens up a new spectrum of feeling in relation to the natural world that refuses a “desire for certainty and neat narratives” (4). Seymour offers a form of irreverent ecocriticism that approaches the serious stakes of our environmental predicament by not taking itself so seriously, and so welcomes the critical potentialities of more playful affective registers: “absurdity and irony … ambivalence, camp, frivolity, indecorum, awkwardness, sardonicism, perversity, playfulness, and glee” (4).

Seymour’s work signals an exciting turn in the affective attunements of contemporary ecocriticism that we, as scholars of Romanticism interested in appraising the ecocritical tradition that continues to shape our own field, find much affinity with. One need only think, to give just a few examples, of the enduring catastrophic resonances of Shelley’s The Last Man, or of the “ghost” of enclosure in Clare’s poetry and prose (Bewell 277), to appreciate the persistence of the elegiac as a predominant Romantic ecocritical mode. As Jess Cotton has it, our current climate crisis is often read as a “culmination of a long downward turn since the slow trauma of industrialization reaped havoc on our communion with the natural world” (2058) that Romanticism bears witness to. Such a perspective can also be considered a “Romantic” narrative in itself (albeit a fairly totalizing one). To practice Romantic ecocriticism within this narrative is to reckon frequently with mourning and loss. And yet, as we propose, there is a legacy of Romantic writing about nature that speaks as much to the expansion of the affective landscape in contemporary ecocriticism—encompassing the weird, the playful, the ambivalent, and the unknowable—as it does to the rich and important griefwork in critical environmentalism. What follows, then, are attempts to open up further avenues for Romanticism and affective ecology, while our focus on the funny feelings of two canonical male poets provides another perspective and potential history to what Seymour understands as our contemporary popular culture’s radical response to nature.

Clare’s comical misadventures

Our endeavor to think about the funny feelings explored in Romantic poems about the natural world came during a time when I found myself returning frequently to a sonnet by John Clare. It was written during his “middle period” (c.1822–37), and is an example of a running theme across his verse—either a speaker or another observed figure searching for and marveling at birds’ nests. Titled “The Wrynecks Nest,” it was published in Clare’s final volume The Rural Muse (1832), although he had written an earlier version between 1819 and 1832 which is the one considered here:

That summer bird its oft repeated note

Chirps from the dotterel ash & in the hole

The green woodpecker made in years remote

It makes its nest—where peeping idlers strole

In anxious plundering moods—& bye & bye

The wrynecks curious eggs as white as snow

While squinting in the hollow tree they spy

The sitting bird looks up with jetty eye

& waves her head in terror too & fro

Speckled & veined in various shades of brown

& then a hissing noise assails the clown

& quick with hasty terror in his breast

From the trees knotty trunk he sluthers down

& thinks the strange bird guards a serpents nest. (4: 290, lines 1–14)

This is a funny poem. Funny because it stages a form of comical misadventure, and because its humorous and almost slapstick physical comedy accommodates stranger and more unsettling feelings and experiences. Clare’s poetry is not often discussed for its humor, especially in relation to his perception of the natural world, where it can be hard to escape the (albeit important) narrative of the degradations of enclosure and traumatic loss of common land and customs. And yet, the figure of the “clown” frequents his poetry and prose. He is a combination of stock rustic peasant or unlearned countryman, and of Clare’s own sense of a heedless observer who blunders about with no eye or appreciation for the small beauties of the natural world as seen by the poet. There is a different but related kind of clowning about going on in this sonnet, where Clare holds ignorance and knowledge closely together in his study of figures who disturb safe nesting places in their desire to observe and to plunder them, but get more than they bargained for in the process. The poem seems as concerned with the conjoined excitement and terror of mistakes and misidentification as it is with the naturalist’s precision that characterizes many of Clare’s other bird’s nest poems and sonnets. Its subtle combination of playfulness and fright makes the poem a key example of Clare’s contribution to the cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical interest in fear in the Romantic period.

Our NASSR/BARS 2022 panel attempted to make room for feelings and emotional states that register outside Romanticism’s received canonical affective range. As Bladow and Ladino’s edited collection shows, fear does hold a place of emotional and aesthetic privilege in typically “Romantic” approaches to the natural world, with the predominance of both the Kantian and Burkean sublime being a clear example. I wish, however, to explore the odder, relational qualities of fear as they unfold in Clare’s poetry and prose. Philip Fisher defines and re-values fear as one of what he terms the “vehement” passions: historically, intense, and ostensibly irrational feelings (he offers, alongside fear, wonder, anger, grief, and shame as examples) which produce states in which “something new is disclosed to us” (2). Seeking to reclaim the older language of the passions that terms like “emotion” and “mood” have tended to displace in our contemporary moment, Fisher reaches for a form of interdependent feeling, a medium for recognizing the relationship between our inner lives and our outer worlds, and a reclaiming of passionate or “vehement” states not as passive conditions that overwhelm or impede thought or action, but that facilitate careful attention to that which provokes such strong feeling. In Clare’s case, this line of thinking about the value of the passions as they unfold ways of relating to the world is helpful for approaching his particular blend of poetry and natural history.

Clare’s sonnet does not name an animal which one would expect to incite fear. The wryneck, a species of bird related to the woodpecker that used to be a common breeding bird in Britain but is now a visiting migrant in the spring and autumn, is hidden away, and difficult to identify. The “terror” that it inspires in the poem’s subjects comes instead from a combination of the element of surprise, and from a resistance to classification inherent in the bird itself. Clare’s poetic study of the bird is a deft exercise in holding different registers and forms of knowledge together lightly, to build up a collective picture of the experience of the nonhuman; it turns on plaiting together the perspectives of the knowing onlooker who ultimately presents the events of the poem to us, the “peeping idlers” and “clown” who prey upon and disturb the wryneck, and the bird itself. We get, then, a kind of triple encounter—with the bird as Clare knows it, with it as it appears to these figures of ignorance, and with its own response to their intrusions. If we know nothing about wrynecks before reading this poem, it can appear almost allegorical in its representation of the bird in distress as snake-like, its territorial hissing as though it guarded a “serpents nest” an echo of the transgressions of Eden and a judgement on those clowns and idlers who corrupt the bird’s sanctuary by reaching into places they should not.

Clare, of course, did possess detailed knowledge of the wryneck, as both this poem and his natural history prose reveal. Here is his description of the bird in his attempt to list the orders of birds in Pet. MS A46, also recorded in Margaret Grainger’s edition of Clare’s Natural History Prose Writings:

a beautiful bird of different shades of brown whose various shades is not observable till close to it when it sits on its nest or on a tree it makes an odd motion with its [del. neck] head turning about first to the left & then the right & I think this motion gave it the name of Ryneck it builds in hollow trees and in the old deserted holes of Woodpeckers … I found one last year in Billings Orchard with 16 eggs in it— … when one approachd the nest the old one made a hissing noise & turnd her head in an odd motion from side to side. (129–30)

What we learn here lends a different color to Clare’s sonnet. Not only does he reveal himself as interchangeable with the “clown” who attempts to take eggs from the wryneck’s nest, and so is fully implicated in instilling fear in the creatures he seeks to observe, but he is also as prone to confusion about the bird’s behavior as are those figures of ignorance. The motion of the wryneck’s head and neck is twice described as “odd,” as Clare’s more taxonomic impulses have to twist and turn to accommodate strangeness and curiosity.

Clare’s own prose account of an experience that clearly informs the sonnet in its narrative and its details noticeably lacks the “hasty terror” that accompanies this encounter with oddity—it is a pretty passionless description, hitting a register of mild confusion instead of instant fear. Still, the serpentine imagery in the sonnet itself suggests that he must have been familiar with associations recorded by other naturalists. Thomas Bewick, in The History of British Birds (1797), for example, describes how the wryneck’s “body is almost bent backward, whilst it writhes its head and neck by a slow and almost involuntary motion, not unlike the waving wreaths of a serpent” (113). Thomas Pennant’s British Zoology (1766) states that the bird

takes its name from a manner it has of turning its head back to the shoulders, especially when terrified … In Gloucestershire it is called the Cuckoo Maid, and Cuckoo Fool, from its attendance on that bird, and from its being considered as the most foolish of the feathered tribe; also the Snake Bird, from its resemblance to that reptile in the form, color, and singular contortion of the neck in various ways. (314)

Robert Mudie, whose Natural History of Birds (1834) was an item in Clare’s personal library, is as compelled as Bewick and Pennant by the strange, snake-like movements of the wryneck, and attempts a more detailed explanation for it, suggesting that, although the bird is related to the woodpecker in that it “adheres to the bark of trees,” it cannot

strike so forcibly with the bill, or so repeatedly in one place, as the woodpecker; but the wryneck has the joints of that organ remarkably quick and free in their motions, so that when it is searching the crevices, now on the one side now on the other, the well-defined mesial line of rich deep brown, which marks the neck and shoulders, appears to be twining up the tree like a little snake. (355)

My point in gathering this collection of studies of the wryneck together is to trace how the confusion of the bird with a snake in Clare’s poem, and how this is wrapped up both with the fear and confusion it provokes and with the bird’s own fearful display, is not simply an ignorant mistake, or a terrified flight from knowledge into superstition or a sense of sinful transgression, but also a careful observation that is woven into the taxonomic history of the wryneck itself. Reading the attempts to classify this “foolish” bird (to use Bewick’s word) alongside the sonnet draws out Clare’s playful positioning of himself as a kind of clever fool, able to hold these strands of knowledge, humor, and fright together simultaneously.

The kind of mutuality between inner self and outer world that Clare can find in fear especially is best expressed in the word “sluthers” at the end of the sonnet. A Northamptonshire dialect word meaning “to slide,” the word captures at once the bathetic comedy of the poem, as that foolish speaker slides clumsily back down the tree trunk in a state of confusion, and of a state of affective transformation and trans-communication. It was edited out of “The Wryneck’s Nest” when it was published in 1835, changed instead to “slides,” but is central to the funny feelings the sonnet is trying to articulate. We can trace an emotional progression from the “anxious plundering moods” of the intruders, to the more impassioned “terror” of the bird, which then transmits back as “hasty terror” in the human subjects. The poem is not without a strong sense of distinction between predator and prey, but it also reaches for a stranger mixture. As the subject “sluthers” down the tree, they themselves become snake-like, the “sluther” close to “slither,” and an embodiment of both the fearful and the captivating movements of the wryneck, and of the affective overtones of the poem. This is a sonnet about encountering frightening difference, from both sides, that also grasps through a strange sort of comedy towards something inherently shared, and its states of intense feeling are what usher in this making of “something new,” to use Fisher’s term. While Clare rarely writes in the received Romantic register of sublime fear and terror, where there is just the right amount of comforting distance to save the subject from complete obliteration, he is the master of the seemingly objective report that quickly switches, or slithers, into states of intense feeling that cannot be easily separated from what one sees, and of articulating the profound sense of estrangement that is twinned with close observation of the natural world, rather than at odds with it.

“A loud uproar in the hills”

Wordsworth’s “To Joanna” was published in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads as one of the “Poems on the Naming of Places.” Like others in the series, it concerns local attachments that evolve between people and place, explores the personal affections that emerge out of or become embedded within natural environments. The poem opens with tender thoughts towards Joanna Hutchinson, fictionalized as having spent her “early youth” “Amid the smoke of cities” (1–2), though she grew up in Penrith. Joanna’s “love” and “strong devotion” towards “The living Beings by [her] own fire-side” (3–4) means her “heart / Is slow towards the sympathies of them / Who look upon the hills with tenderness” (5–7). Wordsworth, who very much sees himself as one of those “transgressors” (9), then narrates a strange occurrence between them while walking in the hills, which is meant to go some way to explaining why “In memory of affections old and true” he “chissel’d out … Joanna’s name upon the living stone”; why “all who dwell by the fire-side / Have call’d the lovely rock, Joanna’s Rock” (81–85). Yet, for all that, this is a poem where feelings get displaced, and where its characters feel misplaced, out of place, unsure what their place is. Most of all, perhaps, it captures a moment where one’s understanding of nature is unsettled and never quite resolved. If “To Joanna” is intent on imagining how attention towards the natural world might lead us to better know each other through kinship with it, then, that co-exists with a sense of not knowing.

In Wordsworth’s telling of it his hushed reverence for, and deep affinity with, nature gets shattered by the sound of laughter:

         such delight I found

To note in shrub and tree, in stone and flower,

That intermixture of delicious hues,

Along so vast a surface, all at once,

In one impression, by connecting force

Of their own beauty, imaged in the heart.

—When I had gaz’d perhaps two minutes’ space,

Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld

That ravishment of mine, and laugh’d aloud.

The rock, like something starting from a sleep,

Took up the Lady’s voice, and laugh’d again:

That ancient Woman seated on Helm-crag

Was ready with her cavern; Hammer-Scar,

And the tall Steep of Silver-How sent forth

A noise of laughter; southern Loughrigg heard,

And Fairfield answer’d with a mountain tone:

Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky

Carried the Lady’s voice;—old Skiddaw blew

His speaking trumpet;—back out of the clouds

Of Glaramara southward came the voice;

And Kirkstone toss’d it from his misty head. (45–65)

It is hard to know quite how seriously to take this scene, or the best way to describe it. Is it ridiculously sublime, or sublimely ridiculous? A way of arriving at awe through the ludicrous, or an incongruous shift that implies such things are their own sort of farce? Wordsworth’s remark elsewhere that he was “caught … in some fit of imagination” suggests even he is not sure (398). Yet his phrase also hints at connections between the laughing mood that erupts and the composition of poetry. A “fit,” after all, describes “a violent … outburst of laughter” (n.2, def. 4.f), but it is also an archaic term for a “part or section of a poem or song” (n.1, def. 1), a metrical term revived by Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, and soon to be parodied by Byron when he refers to “one fytte of Harold’s pilgrimage” in his refashioning of chivalric romance (93).³ In “To Joanna,” Wordsworth is witness to an outburst of laughter, and the meter finds it infectious. “A noise of laughter,” for instance, has added stress for extra volume and excess. Each dash, every “and,” spoofs the ricocheting of laughter as it echoes from peak to peak. The shaking fit of the mountains register, and are registered by, poetic vibrations, as “laugh’d again” trembles in “cavern.” The half-rhyme does more than keep the sound of laughter within earshot. It is an aural indication of the way laughter flows deep within the subterranean chambers of the landscape, poem, and poet—“my ear was touch’d,” Wordsworth tells us (70). “Cavern,” lest we forget, had been associated with the cavity or middle ear from the early seventeenth to the late eighteenth century (def. 2).

There are various kinds of funny business at work in this incident, not the least of which is the “trick” (Wordsworth 398) the poet admits to playing on a local vicar, whose admonishment and “grave looks” (26) partly inspires the ludicrous tale. The desire to poke fun at the vicar arises out of or encourages other forms of ridicule, and the way mockery plays off as well as with sympathy is central to the whole episode. Wordsworth’s obsessive attention towards his surroundings and his own feelings prior to Joanna’s laugh reflects his natural sympathies, of course, but also edges him toward the sort of inflexible “comic character” who is, for Henri Bergson, “comic in proportion to his ignorance of himself” and who is “invisible to himself while remaining visible to all the world” (71). Joanna certainly finds the temptation to laugh irresistible,⁴ but what follows performs a double sort of mockery. The hills imitate her laugh, yet also appear to mock her for being unmoved by the “beauty” of nature. From one perspective, then, Joanna stands in for all those who ridicule Wordsworth for his tender feelings towards the non-human, with those laughing mountains a kind of retort. The description of her reaction near the poem’s conclusion—“to my side / The fair Joanna drew, as if she wish’d / To shelter from some object of her fear” (74–76)—implies she ends up on his side as well as by his side, fostered if not by beauty then by fear. Like Clare’s poem, fear curiously mingles with comedy here, rather than being alleviated by it.

For Jean Paul Richter, an important influence on Romantic ideas of the humorous, the ridiculous is a means of bringing people together in shared laughter. It is a cozy, reassuring notion, though not one “To Joanna” really endorses. Laughter is a fashioner of kinship and cooperation, but it is also a disruptor; it sounds a note of discord. That Janus-like prospect is heard in those hills—they are both melodious and “a loud uproar” (73)—and in the way their collaboration houses tensions. Neither Joanna nor Wordsworth are laughing by this point, moreover, and whatever the laughter of the hills signifies, neither of them are quite in on the joke. If the hills laugh at Joanna they also carry something of her light ridicule of Wordsworth, or indeed anyone who looks on nature with too much self-assurance. That is presumably one reason why they retain a sense of her “voice” throughout even as the laugh evolves into a “noise,” “mountain tone,” and “speaking trumpet.” Nature seems to find Wordsworth’s silent sympathies absurd or outlandish, his certitude in its order and tranquility a cause for wild laughter.

We might say, then, that the episode also mocks the view advanced by some early ecocritics who raised his poetry to an ecological vantage point which would “enable mankind the better to live in the material world by entering into harmony with the environment” (Bate 40). “To Joanna,” like so much of Wordsworth’s poetry, does perhaps encourage readers to “enjoy or endure life … by teaching them to look at and dwell in the natural world” (Bate 4), but not in a way that offers any sort of clear reassurance. Instead, it presents us with the confounding nature of the non-human. The question of whether we can ever really comprehend nature, be that via direct experience or poetry, remains a vexed one for Wordsworth. In the poem he describes “trac[ing] the lofty barrier with my eye / From base to summit” (44–45). To trace is “to make out and follow (with the eye or mind)” (v.1, def. 7.a); it is to map or chart, to record, and so in some sense give order to (def. 10), even “discover or find out” (def. 8.a). But it also means “to put down in writing, to pen” (def. 11.a). Wordsworth winks at the way his own writing gives shape to and crafts the scene, as well as his deep sense of belonging. Yet the funny feelings that erupt thereafter make a mockery of such an idea, remain elusive, out of reach. The chaotic, almost anarchic laughter, presents as something that exceeds his comprehension and which a term like the sublime does not quite fit. It gives voice to things lying somehow beyond him even as they lie beneath the urge to write of it in the first place. Labeling the place “Joanna’s Rock” at the end of the poem is a mark of its significance as a site of familiarity, but where the familiar—whether in the form of nature, other people, or one’s own feelings—has the power to surprise, shock, or disturb.

The scene, then, has something of the sort of “inassimilable otherness” Kate Rigby finds essential to Heideggerian dwelling-in-place and which is part of her call for a “negative ecopoetics” more intent upon “the otherness of the earth” (90, 119). “To Joanna” feels, too, like the sort of ethical ecological approach which for Adam Potkay begins “in balked understanding” (83). What starts as something akin to Wordsworth’s projection of his own emotions onto inanimate, unfeeling things (the sort of thing he is often criticized for and which strips nature of its uniqueness) becomes a way of upending or lampooning that very tendency. Put another way, Wordsworth’s faith in the non-human having a life of its own that might in some way be connected to or like the human one is openly raised only for it to be impudently checked. The “living stone,” for instance, echoes those “living Beings” alluded to in reference to Joanna’s love for others. What seems to me to be at play in such moments might best be conceived as both an affirmation and a parody of his own hopeful imagination and the uncertain certitude that governs his creativity.

Lyric and laughter are both ways for Wordsworth to relay encounters with things we cannot conclusively know but may be furtively broached. It is one of the pleasures of “To Joanna,” and typical of Wordsworth, that something as habitual to being human as a laugh brings us into contact with otherness and the non-human. And that, too, is in keeping with laughter, which is at once common and inexplicable. Georges Bataille noticed that it “hangs in suspense, affirms nothing” (qtd. in Borch-Jacobsen 742–43), for “what is hidden in laughter must remain so” (Parvulescu 85). It is difficult to get a hold of laughter, not least because, as Derek Attridge has said, it “is entirely dependent on unpredictability” (134). Encounters with laughter, like encounters with nature, are rather like Kant’s view of aesthetic experience, which involve us perpetually trying to look beyond the limits of our understanding while at the same time making us conscious of what cannot be fully realized, put into words, or quite shared with others.

Wordsworth’s verse relays, in Mary Jacobus’s words, “the sheer resistance of things themselves to being seen, sensed, or understood,” which “includes the human thing as well as the natural, and even the resistance of the poem to being read.” “Such modes of being or unintentional resistance,” Jacobus suggests, “accentuate the link between things and poetry” (3). As I have tried to suggest, “To Joanna” invites us to recognize the laughable as one of these things, and how, for Wordsworth, it is strangely implicated in nature and poetry. In his writing, the non-human’s essential otherness is captured through a poetics of laughter, which, like nature, is at once both familiar and inexplicable. With its laughing hills, “To Joanna” reminds us that both the laughable and the natural are instinct with wildness. For David Gessner, in his self-accusatory essay, “Sick of Nature,” that commonality is reason enough to lambast the earnestness and self-regard of nature writing. How literary criticism should address ecological issues and environmentalism remains a live question. Wherever we may wish to go next, I think it is worth us at least recognizing another of the funny ironies Romantic poetry throws up all the time: that it is Wordsworth, arguably the literary figure most associated with a sublimely serious approach to nature, who offers us laughter as a “connecting force” between the human and non-human, even as it voices nature’s otherness, and our own.

Notes

1 We wish to express our thanks to our fellow panelists—Katie Garner, Ralph Pite, and Peter Swaab—and the conference audience, for a thought-provoking discussion, and to Andrew McInnes for inviting us to work up this article.

2 See especially Fletcher; Hess; and Morton, “John Clare’s Dark Ecology.”

3 For two excellent discussions of how “fit” informs Romantic poetry, and to which I am indebted, see Wolfson 182 and Bevis 46.

4 Charles Lamb felt similarly, telling Wordsworth in a letter “I should certainly have laughed with dear Joanna” (161).