ABSTRACT
In The Dewy Morn (1884), Richard Jefferies would synthesise two crucial strands of his thought – the pantheist and the historical. This evaluation is germane to a reading of The Dewy Morn, but it may be inflected by the introduction of a more philosophical framework than Williams postulates. This accounts for the fact that in The Dewy Morn Jefferies, though sensitive to these proto-modernist moments of 'epiphany', also seeks to generate plot out of the material of his opening prose-poem in a strategy which may be illuminated by Marx's argument about 'species-life': Man lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must remain in a continuous process with it if he is not to die. Indeed, The Dewy Morn may be read as an exposition of the implications of Heidegger's proposal that 'Only existent man is historical. "Nature" has no history'.
