The poems of Clare’s that still make a catch in the breath and establish a positive bodily hold upon the reader are those in which the wheel of total recognition has been turned. At their most effective, Clare’s pentameters engage not just the mechanical gears of a metre: at their most effective, they take hold also on the sprockets of our creatureliness. By which I mean only that on occasion a reader simply cannot help responding with immediate recognition to the pell-mell succession of vividly accurate impressions. No one of these is extraordinary in itself, nor is the resulting poem in any way spectacular. What distinguishes it is an unspectacular joy and a love for the inexorable one-thing-after-anotherness of the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY: ‘John Clare’s Prog’, a lecture written for the bicentenary of the poet’s birth (1993)
As W. H. Auden points out in 19th Century British Minor Poets, Clare was virtually the only British poet of the nineteenth century who did not belong to the middle or upper-middle class. Born at Helpstone between Peterborough and Stamford, his father was a labourer, his mother illiterate. He had little formal education but read the Bible, bought a copy of Thomson’s The Seasons and was familiar with Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim’s Progress. After the publication of his first volume of poetry, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. By John Clare a Northamptonshire Peasant (1820), he left his first love, Mary Joyce, and married Martha Turner – something that he regretted for the rest of his life. Mary had been his childhood sweetheart; when they met in 1800, he was seven and she was three, and in the wood of the church vestry at Glinton, near Peterborough, he carved his adoration: ‘J.C. 1808 Mary’. Most of the poems addressed to her were written late in his life, and he wrote in his autobiography, Sketches: ‘She was a beautiful girl & as the dream never awoke into reality her beauty was always fresh in my memory.’ The Village Minstrel appeared in 1821, followed by The Shepherd’s Calendar; With Village Stories and Other Poems (1827) and The Rural Muse (1835), which Clare originally wished to call The Midsummer Cushion, a title that referred to the local custom of gathering midsummer flowers, which he was persuaded to change by his friend Eliza Emmerson. In 1832 he left Helpston for Northborough, where he was given a cottage; but deprived of the scenery around Helpston, which he associated with Mary, his mind began to give way. He increasingly identified himself with the hunted animals of the countryside he knew so well: the badgers, the hares and foxes.
As his mental health declined, he believed he had married Mary, addressed her as his wife in his letters, and worried that he was committing bigamy with his actual wife, Martha, who gave birth to seven of his children. In 1837 he was admitted to an asylum in High Beach, Epping, where he was treated well and allowed to wander in the Forest. He escaped, however, in 1841, walking all the way to Northampton, where he deludedly thought that he would be reunited with Mary (he wrote a wonderful prose account of this journey called Recollections of a Journey from Essex). He stayed with his wife for a few months, but at the end of the year he was certified insane and spent the rest of his life in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he wrote some of his best work, including ‘Little trotty wagtail’ and ‘The peasant poet’. The house steward, William Knight, befriended him and encouraged him to write poetry – it is to Knight’s transcription of the manuscripts that we owe the survival of the asylum poems. Clare read Byron, and in his delusion thought that he was Byron. His madness was perhaps partly caused by the declining sales of his work, and it was only in the twentieth century that new editions of his poetry, prose and letters appeared. Clare wrote over 3,500 poems (fewer than a quarter were published in his lifetime), and the best of them reveal an extraordinary ability to capture the sights and sounds of nature in verse – in a way that even Wordsworth, Crabbe and Thomson cannot equal. Artificial poetic diction was alien to him, and his best work is characterized by a profound knowledge of the countryside, a love of animals and birds, and a wonderful directness of utterance, expressed with idiosyncratic spelling and grammar – which is why we print the poems here as they appear in the scholarly nine volumes edited by Geoffrey Summerfield and Eric Robinson – later joined by David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson – (OUP, 1984–2003), who do not tamper with the text but present us with the poems as they originally appeared, unpunctuated, erratically spelt and often with suspect syntax. For another view, see Jonathan Bate’s excellent biography of Clare (Faber) in which he describes how the poet wanted friends and publishers to help him prepare the poems for the press. Clare rarely gave titles to his poems, and those printed here – with the exception of ‘Little trotty wagtail’ and ‘The peasant poet’ – were supplied by the composers.
Here morning in the ploughmans songs is met
Ere yet one footstep shows in all the sky
& twilight in the east a doubt as yet
Shows not her sleeve of grey to know her bye
Woke early I arose and thought that first
In winter time of all the world was I
The old owls might have halooed if they durst
But joy just then was up & whistled bye
A merry tune which I had known full long
But could not to my memory wake it back
Untill the ploughman changed it to the song
O happiness how simple is thy track
– Tinged like the willow shoots the easts young brow
Glows red & finds thee singing at the plough
The driving boy beside his team
Will oer the may month beauty dream
& cock his hat & turn his eye
On flower & tree & deepning skye
& oft bursts loud in fits of song
& whistles3 as he reels along
Crack[ing] his whip in starts of joy
A happy, dirty, driving boy
When once the sun sinks in the west
& dewdrops pearl the evenings breast
All most as pale as moon beams are
Or its companionable star
The evening primrose opes anew
Its delicate blossoms to the dew
And shunning-hermit of the light
Wastes its fair bloom upon the night
Who blind fold to its fond caresses
Knows not the beauty it possesses
Thus it blooms on till night is bye
& day looks out with open eye
Bashed at the gaze it cannot shun
It faints & withers & is done
‘Trotty Wagtail’ sports several interrelated figures to depict her ‘waddling in and out’ etc., and the vocal range exceeds the intentionally claustrophobic limits set upon it by Britten. This is one of John Clare’s most famous poems, written in the Northampton Asylum in which the latter part of his life was passed and where many of his greatest poems were written. The final ‘Good byes’ to ‘Master Wagtail’ (the words had to be repeated in a musical setting!) are a heartbreaking farewell to the natural world which Clare loved and understood perhaps more deeply than any other English poet. ‘The peasant poet’ expresses this, and with extreme poignancy. It seems to me to cover an enormous range; an intense stillness on the flanks, and a majestic centre for ‘Moses with his rod’. ‘The Turkeys’ provide a scherzo (equivalent situation to Britten’s ‘Herd boy’) which appealed to me greatly with its quaint country terms to describe behaviour by turkeys which stretches the imagination. I have made a verbal jumble of the sticks and the kicks and the running away of the boys at the end as an illustrative device in a cycle which I conceived as increasingly pictorial as it continues. So that the final song becomes in effect a miniature scena; ‘The fox’, outwitting dog and humans in lively pursuit ‘to chase the hounds another day’. I am made to think of Janáček’s ‘Little sharp ears’, a work which (foxes apart) has influenced me a good deal. Of Elizabethan references, there are none, though I have elsewhere made an attempted tribute to Robert Jones in a work based closely on one of his songs. (Stephen Dodgson.)
Little trotty wagtail1 he went in the rain
And tittering tottering sideways he near got straight again
He stooped to get a worm and look’d up to get a fly
And then he flew away e’re his feathers they were dry
Little trotty wagtail he waddled in the mud
And left his little footmarks trample where he would
He waddled in the water pudge2 and waggle went his tail
And chirrupt up his wings to dry upon the garden rail
Little trotty wagtail you nimble all about
And in the dimpling water pudge you waddle in and out
Your home is nigh at hand and in the warm pigsty
So little Master Wagtail I’ll bid you a ‘Good bye’
(Jeffreys, Rubbra, Warlock)
He loved the brooks soft sound,
The swallow swimming by.
He loved the daisy covered ground
To him the dismal storm appeared
The very voice of God
And when the evening rock was reared
Stood Moses with his rod1
And every thing his eyes surveyed
The insects i’ the brake
Were creatures God Almighty made
He loved them for his sake
A silent man in lifes affairs
A thinker from a Boy
A Peasant in his daily cares
The poet in his joy.
The turkeys wade the close to catch the bees
In the old border full of maple trees
& often lay away & breed & come
& bring a brood of chelping chickens home
The turkey gobbles loud & drops his rag
And struts & sprunts1 his tail and drags
His wing on ground & makes a huzzing noise
Nauntles2 at passer bye & drives the boys
& bounces up & flies at passer bye
The old dogs snaps and grins nor ventures nigh
He gobbles loud & drives the boys from play
They throw their sticks & kick & run away.
The shepherd on his journey heard when nigh
His dog among the bushes barking high
The ploughman ran & gave a hearty shout
He found a weary fox & beat him out
The ploughman laughed & would have ploughed him in
But the old shepherd took him for the skin.
He lay upon the furrow stretched & dead
The old dog lay & licked the wounds that bled
The ploughman beat him till his ribs would crack
& then the shepherd slung him at his back
& when he rested to his dogs surprise
The old fox started from his dead disguise
& while the dog lay panting in the sedge
He up & snapt & bolted through the hedge
He scampered [to] the bushes far away
The shepherd call[ed] the ploughman [to] the fray
The ploughman wished he had a gun to shoot
The old dog barked & followed the pursuit
The shepherd threw his hook & tottered past
The ploughman ran but none could go so fast
The woodman threw his faggot from the way
& ceased to chop & wondered at the fray.
But when he saw the dog & heard the cry
He threw his hatchet but the fox was bye
The shepherd broke his hook and lost the skin
He found a badger hole and bolted in
They tryed to dig but safe from dangers way
He lived to chase the hounds another day.
When first we hear the shy come nightingales
They seem to mutter oer their songs in fear
& climbing e’er so soft the spinney rails
All stops as if no bird was anywhere
The kindled bushes with the long leaves thin
Let curious eyes to search a long way in
Untill impatience cannot see or hear
The hidden music – gets but little way
Upon the path – when up the songs begin
Full loud a moment & then low again
But when a day or two confirms her stay
Boldly she sings & loud for a half a day
& soon the village brings the woodmans tale
Of having heard the new come nightingale