ABSTRACT In The Country and the City (1973), Raymond Williams dismantled the “pastoral assumption” that the rural laboring class were pictures of health and vitality, uncovering instead the reality of embodied suffering in laboring-class poetry. This essay considers how Robert Bloomfield and John Clare interrogated this “pastoral assumption” of rural health, suggesting that to claim they merely rejected it risks losing sight of their subtle forms of poetic critique. The body, mind, and verse of laboring-class poets were subject to simultaneous cultural narratives of robust health and sickly weakness, within which Bloomfield and Clare had to forge their own distinctive poetic voices. They wrote poems, I argue, that ostensibly upheld a pastoral ideal of health emanating from the natural world, but also critiqued this ideal through an artful hesitancy, especially in their use of apostrophe. I consider the influence of Bloomfield’s “To My Old Oak Table” (1806), and “Shooter’s Hill” (1806) on Clare’s early poem “To Health” (1821) and one of his middle-period sonnets in particular. Far from being uncomfortable or under-confident in the pastoral mode, Bloomfield and Clare brought their own aesthetic experiments and experiences of precarious health to bear on some of its key tropes.

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“我寻求你的健康”：克莱尔和布卢姆菲尔德在田园的极限

摘要 在《乡村与城市》(1973) 中，雷蒙德·威廉姆斯打破了农村劳动阶级是健康和活力的写照的“田园假设”，而是揭示了劳动阶级诗歌中体现苦难的现实。本文考虑了罗伯特·布卢姆菲尔德 (Robert Bloomfield) 和约翰·克莱尔 (John Clare) 如何审问这种农村健康的“田园假设”，表明声称他们只是拒绝它可能会忽视他们微妙的诗意批评形式。劳动阶级诗人的身体、思想和诗歌同时受到健康和虚弱的文化叙事的影响，布卢姆菲尔德和克莱尔不得不在其中打造自己独特的诗意声音。我认为，他们写的诗表面上维护了源自自然世界的健康田园理想，但也通过巧妙的犹豫来批评这一理想，特别是在他们使用撇号时。我考虑了布卢姆菲尔德的“致我的旧橡木桌”（1806 年）和“射手山”（1806 年）对克莱尔的早期诗歌“致健康”（1821 年）和他的中期十四行诗之一的影响。布卢姆菲尔德和克莱尔并没有对田园模式感到不舒服或不自信，而是将他们自己的美学实验和不稳定健康的经历应用于其中的一些关键比喻。