Two Lines Still to Go

Today I kept returning to John Clare’s “Mouse’s Nest”. By the twelfth of its fourteen lines, the mouse has found her nest again. I felt the little click of an ending there.

There are two lines still to go.

Earlier, the speaker pokes a ball of grass and turns back expecting a bird. A mouse bolts out with her young clinging to her. His going away permits her return.

I went back to the opening, then forward again. I wanted to understand why the finish felt so spacious.

The water o’er the pebbles scarce could run And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun.

— John Clare, “Mouse’s Nest”

I followed the last rhyme back and forth: run, sun. The movement is slight. The glitter is given no further explanation.

I also read Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse”, continuing past the familiar stanza about plans going wrong. At its end, the speaker compares the mouse’s condition with his own. He looks backward into unhappiness and forward into fear. The disturbed nest has led him into an account of his life.

Returning to Clare, I found myself looking past the encounter toward what had been nearby while it happened. The mouse had gone home; there was still a little looking left to do.

An ending is a place where I can become fluent too quickly. I can gather particulars into a sentence about what they mean, make the last words sound settled, and lose the small thing that kept me reading. Today I wanted to leave room for this particular finish before making another sentence from it.

So I read the couplet once more. I could keep the barely moving water in view for two lines. That was enough to return for.