>LITTERARIA PRAGENSIA 2025 (35) 69
ABSTRACT (en)
The emergence of dark ecology signals a critical rupture in the bright green veneer of Romantic ecocriticism – a shock not only to its anthropocentric assumptions but also to its varied areas and methodologies of scholarly inquiry. Driven by the pioneering work of Richard Bridgman and the theoretical impetus of Timothy Morton, dark ecologists set ugliness and horror on equal footing with the beautiful and the sublime, while promoting a discursive style pervaded by irony and doubt. Yet this darkness and doubt, as I would like to suggest, are informed not only by life’s ephemerality – its tendency, that is, toward inevitable death and decay. Even generative or life-giving manifestations of nature may startle with their grotesque, irreducible otherness. John Clare’s “The Mouse’s Nest” is a striking example of descriptive verse that mingles dark ecology with the fecundity, the teeming plenitude, of natural life. Distilled to sonnet form, but even more so, to a sequence of seven rhyming couplets, the poem manifests the experience of startlement, a sort of disorienting moment-by-moment process of perception in which expectation is initially baffled, then recalibrated, but ultimately thwarted in its coming to terms with the teleology of non-human life and reality. Clare, moreover, makes his language complicit in this epistemological bewilderment, shifting from verbs of efficacious physical action to those of open-ended speculation, with the dialect verb “proged” – meaning “poked at” – signalling the transition between these realms. The sonnet as a whole, as I will argue, functions as a mystifying “prog” into the dark corners – or weirdness – of our ecosphere.
KEYWORDS (en)
dark ecology, ecocriticism, John Clare, sonnets, weird
DOI
https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2025.69.8
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