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The Place of Rhyme in John Clare’s Northborough Poems

Abstract This essay explores the function of rhyme in John Clare’s Northborough sonnets, arguing that it is both a major innovation within the corpus of Clare’s own work, and that of the eighteenth-century pastoral tradition with which he was engaged. I suggest that rhyme in these poems functions to destabilize, rather than consolidate, their lyric terrain, and that that destabilization enacts a radical resistance to poetical and political forms of enclosure. Attention to this facet of Clare’s poetic language in the Northborough period challenges its extant critical reception, and expands the range of interpretative possibilities available to its readers.