SOURCE: "Time and John Clare's Calendar," in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring, 1982, pp. 59-71.

In the following excerpt, Lessa distinguishes between The Shepherd's Calendar and other pastoral poems of the era, observing that Clare's Calendar relies on precise realism in addition to an understanding of time as cyclical.

John Clare's The Shepherd's Calendar is more descriptively calendar-like than any other pastoral poem that derives its essential structure from the differentiation of days, months or the seasons. The care and precision with which Clare characterises each month according to its weather, customary rural tasks and the typical activities of all living things creates a series of poems unique within the pastoral tradition. Description inevitably had a part in any pastoral, but usually only to provide an appropriate setting for the shepherd-poet whose lyric of love or lament for a lost companion was the poem's real reason for being. And...