Selected Poems

John Clare’s poetry is primarily a celebration and affirmation of life: of human life and of all forms of natural life - of animals, birds, insects; of the dawn and dusk and of the seasons; of the soil and of weather; of trees, rivers, sunlight and cloud. But it is also, inescapably, a song of sorrow and mourning, of loss, deracination and disenchantment. Delight and sorrow co-exist and interact, each rendering the other more intensely poignant.

When Clare was young, he enjoyed the common illusion that the natural order, the world as given, was eternal, a safe stronghold, a protected space: his early poetry is an unexceptionable expression of such confidence: secure verse presenting a secure world. As he began, however, to know the sharper vicissitudes of human intention and hope, his poetry, in order to continue to be true, learned to register and incorporate all those contingencies that threaten to make of any life, of any mind, a diminished thing: time, circumstance, mutability, loss, defeat and the less benign aspects of human culture.

The compliant naivety of childhood that leads us to accept our early environment without question as ‘natural’, was in Clare’s case well justified, for he grew up in a world that seemed to a considerable degree unmarked by human hands. It was in his youth and early manhood that ‘improvements’ began to dismember what had been a relatively unspoilt, organic-seeming landscape: pastures were put to the plough; trees and shrubs uprooted; streams re-routed and tidied up; fens drained; common land enclosed. Dikes, ditches, drains, embankments, new or improved roads reshaped the landscape irrevocably, just as the railways were to do again in mid-century.

The delicate and harmonious balance of nature and culture, manifest in the richness of wildlife cheek by jowl with village paths and stiles - this was disrupted with a determination, a mania for improvement, that struck Clare’s snail-horn sensitivity as a calamity, a destruction of Eden, an act of monstrous sacrilege. It is, then, hardly surprising that Clare’s poetry takes on a clamatory and elegiac note, a note of urgency, protest and grief, so that he both compassionates with wild things turned out of their homes and comminates the more systematized and efficient agriculture that imposed on his fellow-villagers a new and demeaned economic status and a raw despoliation of their hitherto stable landscape. For Clare, poetry became his best way of registering such dreadful loss and of crying out against it: and his subtext from henceforth was to be the resonant and inclusive myth of the loss of Eden. Thus, willy-nilly, he found his theme, his theme found him.

Such was the general predicament - a breaking of old ties, the felling of sacred trees, an obliteration of preconscious rhythms, the mortal damage to old unquestioned ways - but Clare’s individual plight intensified his perceptions of such change; for his trauma was not a matter merely of a general plight, a deleterious change in the culture of the rural poor, further exacerbated by the economic consequences of the Napoleonic wars; it was also the peculiar tragedy of a man, an individual, in limbo. As a spectator, he inhabited the role of a literary onlooker, re-reading his society and his landscape from points of view, through perspectives and lenses, derived from his readings in eighteenth-century topographical and philosophical poetry and botany. Once having tasted of the fruit of such trees of knowledge, how could he ever again feel himself to be at home with illiterate and even brutalized tillers of the soil? At the same time, how could he hope effectively to become, to be, a poet? How find an economically viable life’s work as a poet? He remained, to all intents and purposes, a day-labourer, counting his pennies, following the plough, a muddy rustic with straw in his hair and a non-standard dialect on his lips.

Economic necessity, the daily burden of feeding a family and keeping a roof over their heads, pressed down hard on him, even as he felt confusingly alienated from his unquestioning illiterate neighbours. He ended, thus, in a no man’s land, where he was neither spectator nor participant, exiled by his dreams of metropolitan literary recognition, and yet tugged back in to local dailiness by his need to earn a shilling and by his dependence on the more primal, oral, local roots of the village and its landscape.

But his moments of individuation, of reconcilement, of achieved coherence, were snatched from the long and severe turmoil of a total distress: social, intellectual, vocational and emotional. There is, even yet, no clinical consensus about Clare’s mind and its wounds,^* and no categorical endorsement or denial of the judgements of those who nudged Clare into the confinement of a lunatic asylum. But it is clear from his manuscripts, both his poems and his letters, that under emotional, vocational and economic stress, his fantasies, both positive and negative, slipped over into periodic delusion, and poetic fictions lurched crazily into bouts of hallucination. The tensions that possessed and wracked him - tensions between an irretrievable Edenic past and a pressing, bleak prospect of loss and confinement - these tensions drove him sporadically into something close to schizophrenia or paranoia. Yet, even so, his spiritual strength, his peasant resilience, were such that at times he could transform these tensions into the penetrating eloquence and achieved, stabilizing form of song, of lyric, of elegy, making resonant harmony out of radical discord. And his more extended later poems, written by or through a Byronic persona — such poems derive considerable energy and power from an often savage dialogue between hope and despair, memory and desire, what might have been and what was.

Salient moments in his life’s wretched chronology include: 1820 and 1821, the publication of his first two volumes; 1820, 1822, 1824, his visits to London to meet the literary lions and to be both honoured and patronized as a ‘green man’; 1824-7, his struggles with Taylor, his publisher, to agree on publishing his Shepherd’s Calendar; 1832, his enforced move from Helpstone, his birthplace, to Northborough; 1835, publication of his Rural Muse; 1837-41, his term in High Beech Lunatic Asylum, Epping Forest; 1841, his escape, followed by his removal to Northampton Asylum; 1841-64, his confinement at Northampton.

Clare was born in Helpstone, midway between Peterborough and Stamford, near Peterborough Great Fen. His mother was illiterate; his father, barely literate, had a good repertoire of folk-songs. According to the law of averages, Clare should have become an agricultural labourer, earning a bare subsistence wage, and in possession, at best, of a merely functional literacy.

Still a boy, he set to earn his living by selling the labour of his hands: he worked variously as a ploughboy, as a reaper and thresher, a jobbing-gardener, and at lime-burning. And while still a young man, he fell in love with Mary Joyce, a local farmer’s daughter. Their relationship ended around 1816, seemingly at the insistence of her father. Clare was to be haunted by her ‘presence’ almost to his dying day.

His second volume, The Village Minstrel, appeared in 1821, and two years later he began to plan a long, ambitious poem, The Shepherd’s Calendar, which appeared after many frustrations and delays in 1827. His health first showed signs of serious trouble in 1823, and from then on he was visited by bouts of severe melancholy, severe doubt and hopelessness. His emotional/ nervous afflictions have been posthumously subjected to various analyses; the most plausible diagnosis seems to be a manic-depressive condition in which he became periodically psychotic.

In 1828, he paid his fourth visit to London; in 1830, a sixth child was born; and in 1830 and 1831 he again suffered a severe and prolonged illness. Friends and patrons joined in a well-meaning scheme for his relief, which involved moving him and his family to a more commodious cottage, with a modest smallholding, in the village of Northborough, about two and a half miles - as the crow flies - from Helpstone, and about three and a half miles by road.

‘What are days for?’ asked Philip Larkin in a celebrated poem. ‘Days are where we live ... They are to be happy in ...’ Clare’s representations of his days and seasons, times and places, appear to endorse Larkin’s conclusion. The microcosm of the moment, like the macrocosm of the season - each is celebrated as offering its own distinctive satisfactions, and in his earlier poetry Clare seems to be possessed by the particular vividness of moments and of local places. As Tim Chilcott has remarked, these poems construct and mediate a vivid sense of presentness and of simultaneity. Their achievements, their numbers and their effects can be summed up in one word: plenitude. Given his acutely responsive - and appreciative - sensibility, there was always something worthy of his keenest attention.

Structurally, most of his earlier poems are relatively simple, especially in their syntax, which lies closer to the rhythms of a speaking voice than to those of prose: their subtlety and richness are to be found, not in a sophisticated syntax, but in an intimately absorbed attentiveness to commonplaces - the ordinary is embraced and transformed by the intensity of attention into the extraordinary - and in a stubborn belief in the mimetic sufficiency of ordinary local language, a dialect which registered a special acuity of perception in the realm of elemental sensation. The relationships between word and world appear to be perfectly harmonious and unstrained, as if that which Clare perceived could speak with its own voice.

For over twenty-six years, the constraints of the sonnet and of the rhyming couplet provided Clare with two of his most congenial and elastic frames; and as he became well-versed in the seventeenth-century poets, on some of whom he fathered some of his own poems, and drew more deeply and more surely on English folk-song, so he developed his own distinctive lyricism, and reaffirmed spoken song as one of the distinctive gifts of the English-speaking poetic genius.

By 1832, some difficult truths had shaken Clare’s delicate and vulnerable sensibility: very early he had made the crucial and irreversible shift from a primarily oral culture to a literate and literary culture. But even as his work was in fact published, meeting with a confusing variety of responses from his readers, the integrity of his vision and of his native language was challenged and compromised by well-meaning friends, patrons and editors, and he continued inescapably to live among people to whom poetry was a closed book. His own wife could not share his life as a poet, and Mary Joyce had been absent from his life for over ten years but continued obsessively to engage his deepest and most intense feelings, an emblem of what might have been.

All aspects of his experience, all his social and literary relationships, served to enforce his sense of having left familiar ground yet of not having securely arrived somewhere else; he discovered himself to be adrift, in limbo, an anomalous and wrong-footed misfit: liminal man, in no man’s land, stuck at some kind of threshold, unable to go either back or forward. Even his sacral landscape had proved impermanent, despoiled often beyond recognition by the ‘improvements’ of enclosure.

Such was Clare’s predicament, in which the move to Northborough proved to be the last straw: an intended amelioration of his plight merely served to exacerbate his sense of alienation. In June 1837, little improved by the appearance of The Rural Muse (1835), he was taken to Dr Matthew Allen’s private asylum at High Beech in Epping Forest. He spent just over four years there; his physical health improved considerably, but his mental condition showed little change. He resolved the matter for himself by running away — escaping — in July 1841, and walked all the way to Northborough in search of ‘home’ and in the hope of being reunited with his ‘first wife’, Mary Joyce. She had died, a spinster, in 1838: when his family told him of this, he did not believe them.

After five months with his family, ‘homeless at home’, he was removed in December 1841 — he was allowed to wait until after Christmas but was taken before he could say, or hear, ‘A Happy New Year’ - to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. There he was treated humanely and allowed generous freedom of movement until his misbehaviour resulted in confinement to the asylum grounds. He died there, 20 May 1864, and was buried at Helpstone five days later.

In 1832, Clare was midway in his life as a poet; under the various stresses and limits of his circumstances, his poetry was undergoing a deep change. No longer could he find a seemingly inexhaustible delight in the ‘eternal recurrence of common order’; no longer did he find himself ‘rapt with satisfied attention ... to the mere spectacle of the world’s presence — one way, and the most fundamental way, of confessing one’s sense of its unfathomable significance’; no longer was he able to believe that ‘life is always worth living if one have ... responsive sensibilities’. ^*On the contrary, a deepening sense of disenchantment, of loss and alienation, of having lost his way, threatened to overwhelm the impulse to celebrate the affirmation of joy and delight.

How, then, to resolve the tensions, the collisions and contradictions of the positive and the negative charges? Was any kind of integration, of resolution, possible? His earlier answer — corresponding presumably to his manic-depressive swings of mood - had been to keep them separate, to channel them into two different kinds of poetry, affirmative and elegiac. But from about 1830 on, he was increasingly disposed to let them fight it out within the same, one, text; as a result his poetry realizes a richer and more complex tension, in poems that enact the often savage interplay of his inner dialectic. So his poetry continued, but also modulated: on occasions it reverted, even to the end of his life, to a spare melodic lyricism, close to folk-song: on the other hand, and increasingly so, it unravelled as an endless, seamless interwoven sequence of meditations, reflections, speculations, arguments, self-communings, appeals, accusations, rejoinders, speaking out of the unresolvable quarrel between the claims of the heaven and of the hell which pressed in on his purgatorial soul. In one sense, he evolved a less rich poetry, less rich in terms of sheer sensuous registration — ‘a few weathered images/on the bottom of the burned-out eye’ (Z. Herbert); in another, he came to make a richer poetry, richer for realizing the energies of a mind in conflict with itself.

Clare’s reputation during his lifetime flared briefly like a shooting star, waned and disappeared into a limbo of neglect. Posthumously, it has progressed in fits and starts; but in every generation since his death he has been briefly rediscovered, most conspicuously by Edmund Blunden and Alan Porter after World War I; by Anne Tibble and her husband in the 1930s; and by Geoffrey Grigson during World War II. His critical reputation has always been problematical; academics have tended to cling to received opinion: romantic poetry had achieved a kind of definition by the mid-nineteenth century, and was known to comprise Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron and Shelley. This constellation has persisted, like holy writ, consigning Clare to the outer ditches and hedgerows. The poets, however, have known better: Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, Blunden, James Reeves, Dylan Thomas, John Hewitt, Theodore Roethke, Charles Causley, John Fowles, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney have all borne witness to his fructifying presence in their lives as readers and writers. In so doing, they have taught us that to ask, ‘Is John Clare a major poet?’ is to ask the wrong (pecking-order) question; they have, conversely, taught us to recognize what he, distinctively, can continue to give us: what it is that, variously, we can discover and rediscover; how we can be animated and reanimated through listening to him: a joyful, even ecstatic, obliteration of self in the act of attending; responsiveness to all forms of life; how to speak of vicissitude and loss; how to love local truths, and how to treasure our parochial blessings, and all that our infatuation with Progress would destroy. As Seamus Heaney has written, ‘it was the unique achievement of John Clare to make vocal the regional and particular, to achieve a buoyant and authentic lyrical utterance at the meeting-point between social realism and conventional romanticism.’ And, again, Heaney has helped us to recognize how John Clare ‘lived near the abyss but resolved extreme experience into something infinitely gentle’. ^*