John Clare is a poet of ‘strange doubleness’, as Hugh Haughton puts it.1 He is alert to the natural world, intently, raptly so, yet he is also self‐conscious about his role as a poet, as Haughton’s memorable discussion of ‘The Nightingales Nest’ displays. He often has us in his spell because we think we are reading a poetry that has laid artifice aside, and yet there is much skill in his apparent casualness. Indeed, a critical difficulty posed by Clare is how the reader should respond to his seeming preference for accident over purpose, artlessness over formal control. This section explores such issues in a consideration of a group of poems from across Clare’s career.
Poems state his love for the natural world and catalogue the sights and sounds that he loved with what may look like indifference to overall coherence. Yet, in Stephanie Kuduk Weiner’s words, his ‘anti‐closural endings align his poetry in unexpected ways with the meditative lyric and the fragment’.2 Intuitively or by design (words that often lose an absolute sureness in the work of many poets and especially Clare), his poetry continually surprises, less by virtue of a carefully exhibited complexity than by changes of tone, nuances of expression. He can be ‘wittily artless in a way that performed and undermined his image as an unlettered rustic poet’, as Mina Gorji has it, but he can also be uncannily affecting.3
Clare’s poems about birds’ nests show his capacity for intent observation and sympathy. In ‘The Yellowhammers Nest’, he uses a mixture of rhymes: mainly alternate quatrain rhymes, but also couplets and more irregular chimes to convey the flow of consciousness induced by the sight and thought of the nest. As though in the just‐gone past, ‘a bird flew up / Frit by the cowboy as he scrambled down / To reach the misty dewberry’ (1–3). The scene is alive, Clare’s dialect word ‘Frit’ for ‘frightened’ bringing the vitality of non‐standard English into the poem. We are invited to accompany the poet on his solicitous search: ‘let us stoop / And seek its nest’ (3–4) before the in‐the‐moment, quiet excitement of the nest’s discovery: ‘Aye here it is stuck close beside the bank’ (7), authenticated by the country‐dweller’s eye for detail: the nest is made up of ‘bleached stubbles and the withered fare / That last years harvest left upon the land / Lined thinly with the horses sable hair’ (10–12). The syntax of these lines suits their powers of quick observation; it has a spun‐out connectedness, marked off by the sharply precise, spondaic ‘Lined thinly’.
The poet then knowingly admits the play of ‘fancy’ (14) into the poem, as he compares ‘Five eggs pen‐scribbled over lilac shells’ (13) to the ‘writing scrawls’ (14) which ‘pen‐scribbled’ has already metaphorically brought to mind. But Clare’s metaphors do not imply a retreat into any falsifying idyll; they serve as the basis for a robust rural poetic, namely, that the yellowhammer is like the poet and ‘that old molehill like as parnass hill’ (19). Not untypically, this movement into something like assertive reverie is not allowed the final word. The poet goes on to sense, as though by an instinctive reaction, that a serpent might, literally, enter what has turned unostentatiously into an Eden, as well as being a real habitat. He thinks of how ‘snakes’ (25) might ‘seize the helpless young’ (26). The thought rounds itself out in the uncoiling syntax, as the depressing, dawning possibility of ‘ill’ (23) threatens the poet’s wish that the spot he has taken us to should be left ‘A happy home of sunshine flowers and streams’ (22). Instead, the snakes ‘are known’ (25) to come and go, each an unwanted ‘guest’ (27),
Leaving a housless‐home a ruined nest
And mournful hath the little warblers sung
When such like woes hath rent its little breast. (28–30)
The ‘little warblers’ become self‐elegists in this glimpse of paradise lost, the ruination of the nest. In thirty lines, Clare has moved from keen‐eyed naturalist, to playful presider over poetic ‘fancy’, to sombre recognizer and mourner of ‘such like woes’.
Loss is unignorable for Clare, precisely because he values that which is caught up in transience, perishability. At the same time, a later sonnet, ‘The Yellowhammer’, seems to speak back to the earlier poem, as it reaffirms the creative, nest‐building instinct of the bird. The poem finishes thus:
In early Spring when winds blow chilly cold
The yellow hammer trailing grass will come
To fix a place and choose an early home
With yellow breast and head of solid gold (11–14)
With an almost proto‐Yeatsian emphasis, the poet places his trust in ringingly firm rhymes, concluding with the bird’s ‘head of solid gold’ that clinches the poem (the fine phrase unimpeded by any closing punctuation) and outbraves the Spring’s ‘chilly cold’. Verbs are firm and active: ‘fix’ and ‘choose’. There’s an evident if latent admiration for the bird’s instinctual pluck and concern to make a home, and the poem itself becomes an improvised, shapely haven, a verbal bird’s nest, composed from what lies to hand, overrunning artificial boundaries between octave and sestet: ‘Dead grass, horse hair and downy headed bents / Tied to dead thistles ... / Close to a hill o’ ants’ (7–9).
In ‘The Flitting’, describing his movement from Helpston to Northborough in 1832, Clare authenticates feelings of loss through details that have an odd, almost inconsequential but ignorable force: ‘I sit me in my corner chair / That seems to feel itself from home’ (17–18) is an example, where Clare knows the chair does not, but only ‘seems to feel itself from home’, but also knows he cannot escape the feeling that it does, because his sense of estrangement is pervasive. The poem’s eight‐line stanzas employ two sets of alternating rhymes (ababcdcd), as though to point up the speaker’s movement between then and now, even as he criticizes himself for doing so, as in the lines: ‘I dwell on trifles like a child / I feel as ill becomes a man / And still my thoughts like weedlings wild / Grow up to blossom where they can’ (57–60). In those lines one hears a note of resilience in the midst of unhappiness often found in Clare.
Elsewhere, as in ‘[O could I be as I have been]’, Clare brings complex feelings into connection with limpid balladic lyricism. In this poem, Clare leaves unexplained the reason for his inability to be as he has been, contrasting in this respect with Wordsworth whose sentiments in the ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ he echoes.4 Clare deflects attention from his current sadness by focusing on his former delights, and yet he heightens interest in it, too. The result is a blend of ardent pleasure in the past and a strain of pathos. The repeated exclamations of the opening two stanzas – ‘O could I be’ (1, 5) – sound a chord of lament that sustains itself through the poem’s return to the past, when Clare was ‘A harmless thing in meadows green / Or on the wild sea shore’ (3–4), ‘A dweller in the summer grass’ (7), and ‘A tennant of the happy fields’ (9). Here the nouns bring out Clare’s major theme of dwelling, of being part of a known and treasured landscape. They also, by implication, suggest his great counter‐theme, that of displacement and loss. Clare famously deplored the impact on his home village Helpston of enclosure (lands being taken out of common use) as a result of which ‘he saw venerable trees cut down, whole coppices destroyed, and the streams diverted from their natural courses’.5
There is, in ‘[O could I be as I have been]’, a shift of mood in stanza 4, where Clare recalls his status as a dweller, discussing what he did, first through an infinitive, ‘To sit on a deserted plough’ (13), that tangles doing with contemplation. The poem mingles an ease of phrasing with an economical particularity, as in the stanza:
The harrows resting by the hedge
The roll within the Dyke
Hid in the Ariff and the sedge
Are things I used to like. (17–20)
Place‐names and words for instruments of labour (‘roll’ is a ‘large, heavy wooden roller for breaking clods’, p. 513) are ‘things I used to like’ – and still do, the poem suggests, through the touching naturalness with which ‘like’ responds to the rhyming prompt of ‘the Dyke / Hid in the Ariff’ (or ‘goosegrass’, p. 506). The poem shows Clare’s love of dialect – the ‘head‐aches’ that ‘left a stain’ (24) are ‘common poppies’ (p. 510) – but even those much‐loved words seem to belong to ‘what I have been’, ‘when I roved in shadows green / And loved my willow tree’ (26, 27–8). Clare contrives a shift here from the earlier ‘meadows green’, ‘valleys green’ (6), and ‘places green’ (8) that speaks of a movement towards darkness and dissolution as well as the contending impulse to celebrate his own recollected experience: one notes the possessive adjective ‘my’.
Tilting away from sadness, however, the final stanza picks up on the earlier infinitive construction (‘To sit’) and suggests that the origin of Clare’s poetic career lay, perhaps paradoxically, in his past:
To gaze upon the starry sky
And higher fancies build
And make in solitary joy
Loves temple in the field (29–32)
The lines complicate a clear division between past and present as Clare aligns the building of ‘higher fancies’ with a time of hope from which he is now excluded, and yet he re‐enters that time through memory. The lines resonate less with loss than with recovery: past and present converge as Clare both recalls and imagines the ability to ‘make in solitary joy / Loves temple in the field’.
‘I am — yet what I am, none cares or knows’ explores the poet’s sense of madness at a time of existential crisis. Self is experienced as a desolation and desertion.
I am—yet what I am, none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:—
I am the self‐consumer of my woes;—
They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes:— (1–5)
The opening ‘I am’ echoes wryly and ironically God’s self‐definition to Moses, ‘I AM THAT I AM’ (Exodus 3:14), summoned up by Coleridge in his definition of the ‘primary IMAGINATION’ in chapter 13 of Biographia Literaria as ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’.6 Yet there’s an obstinate energy pulsing below and through the nihilism and despair of ‘I am the self‐consumer of my woes’. The speaker’s ‘woes’ are forces that seem inextricably internal and external. ‘They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host’ as though they compose an endless self‐easing ‘host’. And, strangely, they also challenge comparison with erotic intensity and frustration since ‘They rise and vanish’ ‘Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes’. The stanza’s enjambed last line, passing over the stanza break, opens with a steeled, sad repetition, ‘And yet I am, and live’, where ‘and live’ is alert to the fact that being involves becoming; he not only is but he has to live with the fact of who he is now, a state at once irrefutable and inexplicable.
Comparison, ‘like vapours tost // Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, —/ Into the living sea of waking dreams’ (6–8), drives the poem on into further exploration of the poet’s predicament. The drum‐beat struck up by the relentless pattern of interlacing ab rhymes takes on a different form in the second stanza in which, as in the third and final stanza, Clare inserts a third concluding couplet rhyme after the ab rhymes of the stanza’s first four lines. It’s a technical feature that accompanies his way of altering his tones and angles, helping to make his self‐representation at once powerfully affective and open to development. So, the ‘nothingness of scorn and noise’ passes ‘Into the living sea of waking dreams’. The second line, there, moves from a feeling of external oppression, ‘scorn and noise’, into a sense of internalized confusion, ‘the living sea of waking dreams’ (8), that amplifies the earlier statement that ‘I am, and live’. These ‘waking dreams’ involve and evolve a metaphor of ‘the vast shipwreck of my lifes esteems’ (10) which Mark Sandy aptly describes as a ‘turbulent, surreal, seascape’ and where ‘lifes esteems’ means both what he has esteemed and those who have esteemed him.7 This second meaning comes clear in the stanza’s final couplet: ‘Even the dearest, that I love the best, / Are strange—nay, rather stranger than the rest’ (11–12). The modulation in ‘nay, rather stranger’ typifies the way in which emotion in the poem is able to comment on itself and change, even as it remains intense throughout.
The final stanza moves from regret to longing, longing for an ungendered space never peopled yet at one with his ‘childhood’:
I long for scenes, where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God;
And sleep as I in childhood, sweetly slept,
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below—above the vaulted sky. (13–18)
Harold Bloom may overstate the case when he writes, in accord with his idea that Clare is negotiating between extremes of attachment to nature and desperate trust in imagination, that ‘The yearning is apocalyptic – not for childhood but for scenes “where man hath never trod”’.8 Clare’s final position is more mixed than Bloom would have us believe, both a pure imaginative space, created by longing, and a product of memory, nostalgia, and residual piety. Yet the final line abolishes any sentimentality, as it intimates that the only peace the poet knows is, if not in, then in anticipation of the tomb. Here, as in other late poems, as Bloom notes,9 the self that won’t or can’t wholly lose itself in Clare’s beloved nature stalks the poetry, an unexorcisable presence.
Even when haunting the poetry, however, the Clarean self looks for company. Clare’s ‘An Invite to Eternity’ extends an initially tender yet increasingly sardonic invitation to the poem’s addressee: ‘Wilt thou go with me sweet maid / Say maiden wilt thou go with me’ (1–2). The tetrameters overthrow acceptance of what is; they become the medium through which Clare can imagine a ‘Where’ that is the shadowy mirror world of this‐worldly nature, a place ‘Where life will fade like visioned dreams / And mountains darken into caves’ (11–12). It is a place, one might hazard, familiar to Romantic poetry, found in such works as Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, a place that is antithetical to the real as it bears witness to the misshaping as well as shaping possibilities of imagination. It is a place of and speaking to a state of ‘sad non‐identity / Where parents live and are forgot / And sisters live and know us not’ (15–16). Familial roles still exist but ‘we’ – perhaps gladly, perhaps sadly – have been airbrushed out of knowledge. It is a post‐Coleridgean ‘strange death of life’ (18), a world in which the usual markers of belonging or identity have been erased and yet in which we are still able ‘to see / Things pass like shadows’ (23–4). The final stanza offers its queasily triumphalist QED; the invitation to accompany the poet into this place is, it’s implied, perilous, impossible, and the only way to access a vision to which the speaker has unique access:
The land of shadows wilt thou trace
And look—nor know each others face
The present mixed with reasons gone
And past, and present all as one
Say maiden can thy life be led
To join the living with the dead
Then trace thy footsteps on with me
We’re wed to one eternity (25–32)
Clare becomes an impossible Jesus‐like figure, admonishing his would‐be companion to abandon all she knows and follow him. At the same time, even as he gives her space to accept or decline an offer that grows increasingly bewildering (they won’t ‘know each others face’), he implies, half grimly, that they’re already married, ‘wed to one eternity’ (the line can be read as a statement of how things are or as an anticipation of how they would be). Viewed as a poem about Clare’s isolation and need for an audience, it attaches itself to a group of Romantic poems, from ‘Tintern Abbey’ onwards, that thematizes the difficult, necessary role of the reader and implies the impossible, preciously ambivalent gift proffered by the poet.