PENGUIN CLASSICS

 

 

 

JOHN CLARE: SELECTED POEMS

 

JOHN clare was born in Helpstone, Northamptonshire, in 1793. The son of a labourer, he worked variously as a ploughboy, reaper and thresher. Although his mother was illiterate and his father barely literate, Clare himself early became an avid reader and began to write verse at the age of thirteen. As a youth, he fell in love with Mary Joyce, a local farmer’s daughter, but their relationship ended around 1816, seemingly at the insistence of her father. Her memory, however, was to haunt him for the rest of his life.

 

It was in 1820 that his first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life, was published. He went to London, met many literary figures and in the same year married Patty (Martha) Turner. His second volume of poems, The Village Minstrel, appeared in 1821 and, two years later, he began to plan a long ambitious poem, The Shepherd’s Calendar, which appeared, severely edited, in 1827.

 

Meanwhile, however, his health was showing signs of serious trouble. He had bouts of severe melancholy, doubt and hopelessness, brought on perhaps by his disassociation from all that was familiar to him and a sense of not having securely arrived somewhere else. In 1821, at the instigation of well-meaning friends, he left his native cottage for Northborough, but the move was disturbing and served only to reinforce the theme of loss in his work.

 

In June 1837, little improved by the publication of The Rural Muse (1835), he was admitted to an asylum at High Beech, Epping. He escaped in 1841, walking home to Northamptonshire in the delusion that he would be reunited with Mary, to whom he thought himself married. She had died, a spinster, in 1838, and after five months with his family, he was again taken away, this time to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. He died there in 1864.