John Clare and the Shifting Skylark.

The article examines the evolving symbolic and poetic significance of the skylark in the work of John Clare, a nineteenth-century rural laborer and poet, tracing its role from empirical natural history to a more complex, often visionary symbol across Clare’s career. It situates Clare’s skylark poems within the broader early nineteenth-century literary context shaped by William Wordsworth’s and Percy Shelley’s differing poetic uses of the skylark—as both a grounded natural subject and a transcendent, Platonic ideal. Clare’s mid-career poetry emphasizes the skylark’s nest and habitat, highlighting ecological tensions caused by mechanized agriculture, while his later asylum writings reflect a shift toward a more fragmented, symbolic skylark that mediates his displacement and psychological struggles. The article argues that Clare’s skylark resists simplistic readings, embodying both a laboring-class identification and a nuanced engagement with nature, memory, and poetic form.