In her abundant and generous diary of a year of nature-surrounding, Emma Mitchell writes:

A very small story was unfolding in front of me: I was seeing a snapshot of that creature's life and I felt thrilled and privileged to witness it. I examine humble yet exquisite collections of plants or lichens growing on the pebbles of Dungeness or the small creatures that dart about in rock pools. The nineteenth-century poet John Clare called this ‘dropping down’, and he did it too, sitting among wild plants to see the natural world from the point of view of a snipe in its nest.
From Emma Mitchell's The Wild Remedy: How Nature Mends Us

John Clare (July 13, 1793 – May 20, 1864), a significant poet of the Romantic period, was an untrained poet and farm laborer from Northamptonshire, England. His Major Works abound with nature, but nature idealized, at times abstracted, from a position of sight afforded through this "dropping down."

Where the dark ivy the thorn-tree is mounting,
Sweet shielding in summer the nest of the dove,
There lies the sweet spot, by the side of the fountain,
That's dear to all sweetness that dwells upon love:
For there setting sunbeams, ere even's clouds close 'em,
One stretch'd a long shadow of one I adore;
And there did I meet the sweet sighs of a bosom
Of one ever dear, tho I meet her no more.

Nature, particularly the English countryside, provides Clare with a perfect metaphor for memory, nostalgia, and a capsizing feeling of loss and change.   English poet A. E. Housman also looked to the countryside for his modern, lyrical poetry, using its complexity as a metaphor for isolation and loneliness.

But it was more than that; nature was the subject of Clare's loss. In particular, the wild and common areas were converted to farming and grazing during his lifetime.   Nature writer Robert Macfarlane laments in The Wild Places, nearly a century and a half later:  
"In a land as densely populated as Britain, openness can be hard to find. It is difficult to reach places where the horizon is experienced as a long unbroken line, or where the blue of the distance becomes visible."  
This blue of the horizon, Rebecca Solnit tells us, is the light that cannot get through.

Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Clare witnessed the countryside of his boyhood utterly reshaped. The British Enclosure Acts, enacted by the government during the 18th and 19th centuries, walled and divided common land to create private farms. This had a devastating effect on the physicality of the space and the humans therein. Clare's poetry contains a deep longing for what had been.

Oh, happy Eden of those golden years
Which memory cherishes, and use endears,
Thou dear, beloved spot! may it be thine
To add a comfort to my life's decline.

[...]

Thou far fled pasture long evanish'd scene
Where nature's freedom spreads the flowry green
Where golden kingcups    Kingcup, also known as a buttercup, was inspiration to Pablo Neruda's memorable poem about death.
"We are dust and to dust return.In the end we'reneither air, nor fire, nor water,just dirt,neither more nor less, just dirt,and maybe some yellow flowers.  
From "Ode to some yellow flowers" open'd in to view
Where silver dazies charm'd the 'raptur'd view
And tottering hid amidst those brighter gems. . .
From "Helpstone"

But his poetry runs much deeper than a lamentation for open meadows. For most of his adult life, Clare suffered from depression—"harassed by perpetual bother," he called it, according to historian Robin Lane Fox.   Oh, the litany of words we use to express the swings and arrows of the mental state.  
Musician Patti Smith confesses to having been in a "strange torpor" as she wrote Woolgathering; Hemingway writes about evading that "empty feeling"; while artist and writer Maira Kalman calls it being "in the grips of malaise."
I find tremendous comfort in Seneca: "Do you think you are the only person to have had this experience. Are you really surprised, as if it were something unprescedented, that so long a tour and such a diversity of scene have not enabled you to throw off this melancholy?"  
Not to suggest that all or any of these individuals suffered as Clare did. History seems to think Clare suffered something akin to the manic depression of van Gogh or Robert Lowell. We are all in the grips of something.

During the last two decades of his life, Clare was confined in a mental hospital and wrote, arguably, his best poetry. His sorrow for things lost—nature, horizons, childhood—is a veiled stand-in for the ultimate loss that those of us harassed by depression know all too well: first self, then life.

So when the traveller uncertain roams
On lost roads leading every where but home
Each vain desire that leaves his heart in pain
Each fruitless hope to cherish it in vain
Each hated track so slowly left behind
Makes for the home which night desires to find
And every wish that leaves the aching breast
Flies to the spot where all its wishes rest

Reading Clare and comparing his 19th-century vantage point (pure, unbounded common land) to modern agricultural scapes (separated, divided, but beautiful) inspired my rumination on walls and a look at The Importance of Walking About.

"John Clare" by British portrait artist William Hilton, painted in 1820 when Clare was twenty-seven.

A stout companion to Clare's works is Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways, which meditates on the intersection of paths and humans throughout the British Isles. Or Thomas A. Clark's "In Praise of Walking," a slim prose/poem that says everything considerable there is to say about roaming.

Additionally, the work of Cumbrian sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, who builds structures that "can take the quality of a design in the landscape," provides a fascinating counterpoint to the interaction of human systems and nature (that we need not disappear into it).

Storm King Wall, New York, 1997. "The most compressed part of the wall, where the trees grow closest together, is the heart of the sculpture, and the place where there is the most tension." Photograph by Andy Goldsworthy.

I wish these two could meet and dialogue: what Clare might say about Goldsworthy's walls? What might Goldsworthy say about Clare's need for an uninterrupted, unblemished, non-humanized landscape?

Sweet rest and peace ye dear departed charms
Which once industry cherish'd in her arms
When Peace and Plenty known but now to few
Were known to all and labour had his due
When mirth and toil companions thro' the day
Made labour light and pass'd the hours away
When nature made the fields so dear to me
Thin scattering many a bush and many a tree
Where the wood minstrels sweetly join'd among
And cheer'd my needy toilings with a song.
From "Helpstone"

Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

One century after Clare, English poet, and essayist Laurie Lee observed, "A decade in the country can slip down the gullet with the deceptive smoothness of an oyster." Lee's essays find the same sweetness and delight in the English countryside that Clare did, although it had changed so significantly. A consolation that although everything around us may change, humans will always feel the same.