Believing in Poetry - John Clare

 
The English poet John Clare was marketed in 1820 by his publisher as ‘the peasant poet’ and that name as stuck. But for many years his work was considered trifling compared to other poets of that age such as Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. He came from a humble family. His father was a farm-worker, a thresher, and he stopped school-learning at the age of eleven. He truly was a self- taught writer because he read widely, especially the 18th century English poets.

Now 200 years later, there are difficulties for those of us who are used to modern poetry, in reading his work. It’s pretty much all in rhyme, it bounces along, a lot of it in sonnet form, he uses antiquated words like thee and thy, and he also uses local Northamptonshire dialect words.
But there’s a strong music to it, and he uses many simple pungent words with Anglo Saxon roots which I think give it an earthiness and an English-ness.

I find his poetry to be both energising, touching – and spiritual, in the sense that it looks closely at places – the spirit of places – minutely observed rural landscapes in his native Northamptonshire. They are not breathtakingly beautiful places like the Lake district or Italy: they are plain and homely.

There are no classical allusions as in Keats or Shelley. There are a lot of birds, and birds’ nests and birds’ territory described carefully. Of course, in those days, it was common for boys to go stealing eggs from birds’ nests. Here’s
 
The Sand Martin
Thou hermit haunter of the lonely glen
And common wild and heath – the desolate face
Of rude waste landscapes far away from men
Where frequent quarries give thee dwelling place
With strangest taste and labour undeterred
Drilling small holes along the quarry’s side
More like the haunts of vermin than a bird,
And seldom by the nesting boy descried -
I’ve seen thee far away from all thy tribe
Flirting about the unfrequented sky
And felt a feeling that I can’t describe
Of lone seclusion and a hermit joy
To see thee circle round, nor go beyond
That lone heath and its melancholy pond.
 
I guess anyone who has walked early in the morning in Greenwich park and seen a woodpecker or a mistle thrush will know that special joy, though I’m afraid it is not a hermit joy – there’s always someone around in the park!

Now this was the period of the Enclosures, when John Clare saw pastures ploughed up, hedges uprooted, common land enclosed and farmworkers forced by poverty to work in factories.  So, some of his work dealing with that huge change - is political. 
One poem is The Lamentations of Round Oak waters – it’s quite long – here’s just a taste of it – he is lamenting the loss of a brook and all the surrounding trees and fields.
 
The greens the meadows and the moors
are all cut up and done
There’s scarce a greensward spot remains
And scarce a single tree
All naked are thy native plains
And yet they’re dear to thee.
 
But O my brook, my injured brook
‘Tis that I most deplore
To think how once it used to look
How it must look no more.
 
 
This poem is called Remembrances – where he uses the names of all the old places he knew, which have changed beyond recognition. Here’s just a stanza.
 
Remembrances
At Langley Bush I roam but the bush hath left its hill
On Cowper Green I stray – tis a desert strange and chill
And spreading Lea Close Oak, ‘ere decay had penned its will
To the axe of the spoiler and self-interest, fell a prey
And crossberry way, and Old Round Oak’s narrow lane
With its hollow trees like pulpits, I shall never see again
Enclosure like a Bonaparte, let not a thing remain
It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill
And hung the moles for traitors, though the brook is running still
It runs a naked stream, cold and chill.
 
There’s so much longing and nostalgia there, and anger bubbling under the surface about the Industrial Revolution and what it did to the wide spaces and appearance of the English countryside. The poet Paul Farley has written about John Clare and he suggested that we, today, can connect with those emotions.  I’m quoting from him here ‘our sense of the local and the solidity of things in it, has been adjusted by a century of cinema and TV and photographed images, and that the explosion of telecommunications and internet has altered our relationship with the local environment.’ He suggests that John Clare, the great poet of dwelling and displacement has something important to say to our own times.
 
I don’t want to give you the idea that much of John Clare’s work was political.  A lot of it was gleefully descriptive! Often with no conclusions, no flourishing endings.  He presented a picture of God’s world, unadorned.

Here’s one of his best-known poems about a wild heath, when it was still untamed. 
 
Emmonsails Heath in Winter
I love to see the old heath's withered brake
Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling
While the old heron from the lonely lake
Starts slow and flaps his melancholy wing
And oddling crow in idle motions swing
On the half-rotten ash tree's topmost twig
Beside whose trunk the gypsy makes his bed -
Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig
Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread;
The fieldfare chatters in the whistling thorn
And for the 'awe round fields and closen rove
And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove
Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again.
 
In case you are wondering - Bumbarrels are birds – the long-tailed tit!  He wasn’t worried about using provincial slang and vulgar words – ‘I am of that class’ – he said. 

He was taken up by the publisher John Taylor in 1820, and for a while he was flavour of the month in London, bothered by dozens of visitors at his house in Helpston in Northamptonshire where he lived with his wife and children.
There’s an amazing energy and joy to some of his most vivid nature poems – as a journalist I love precision of words, and the sheer detail of John Clare’s description is beguiling.  I’ll read you just a part of:
 
 
 
The Flood
 
On Lolham Brigs in wild and lonely mood
I've seen the winter floods their gambols play
Through each old arch that trembled while I stood
Bent o'er its wall to watch the dashing spray;
As their old stations would be washed away
Crash came the ice against the jambs and then
A shudder jarred the arches - yet once more
It breasted raving waves and stood again
To wait the shock as stubborn as before
- While foam, brown crested with the russet soil
As washed from new ploughed lands, would dart beneath
Then round and round a thousand eddies boil
On t’other side - then pause as if for breath
One minute - and engulphed - like life in death..
 
 
And I’ll just read the last few lines as well…
 
 
Strange birds like snow spots o'er the huzzing sea
Hang where the wild duck hurried past and fled.
On roars the flood - all restless to be free
Like trouble wandering to eternity.
 
There’s a lot of eternity in John Clare’s work – looking at the natural world he knew so well always seemed to bring his mind to the Creator, to God, and that’s something I think a lot of us in church will have felt too. That’s often how he writes about his childhood in the countryside.  This is from another poem called:
 
Emmonsales Heath.

Joy nursed me in her happy moods
and all life’s little crowd
that haunt the waters, fields and wood
would sing their joys aloud
 
I thought how kind that mighty power
Must in his splendour be
Who spread around my boyish hour
Such gleams of harmony.
 
Hope’s sun is seen of every eye
The halo that it gives
In natures wide and common sky
Cheers everything that lives.
 
After his fourth volume of poems, by 1827, his initial fame had worn thin and the public moved on.  He still needed to provide for himself his wife and children and his parents. He suffered from depression.

Here’s the first stanza of a poem called
 
‘What is Life’
And what is life? An hourglass on the run
A mist retreating from the morning sun
A busy bustling still repeated dream
Its length? A minute’s pause, a moment’s thought
And happiness? A bubble on the stream
That in the act of seizing shrinks to nought.
 
By 1837, John Clare was in debt and his mental health was at a crisis point. This poem, written earlier, gives us a sense of his state of mind when he was depressed.
 
This poem called Lines: I am
 
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-frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live like vapours tossed
 
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise
Into the living sea of waking dreams
Where there is neither sense or life or joys
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems
Even the dearest that I love the best
Are strange – nay rather, stranger than the rest.
 
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.
 
In 1837, he was encouraged by his editor to be committed to a private asylum in Epping Forest in Essex. Four years later, in 1841, he decided to make his way back to his home, 80 miles on foot, eating grass along the way.

His wife Patty took him back but after a few months at home, he was again certified insane, and removed to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum.  Twenty-three years later, he died there.
 
It’s a tragic story. But we still have the poems.
In the past forty years or so, his poetry has undergone something of a rediscovery and revival – partly thanks to the devotion of some Irish poets including Seamus Heaney. It’s the nature poems that are most popular for the way they evoke the simple joy of looking at hedges and rivers and fields and birds.  I think we should also admire his searingly honest poems which express his own mental anguish, in an age where it was called insanity.
One last poem, which is a jewel of observation – even if it’s not very seasonal -it’s called:
 
Snowstorm
 
What a night; the wind howls, hisses and but stops
To howl more loud, while the snow volley keeps
incessant batter at the window pane
making our comfort feel as sweet again,
and in the morning when the tempest drops,
at every cottage door, mountainous heaps
of snow lie drifted, that all entrance stops
until the besom and the shovel gains
the path – and leaves a wall on either side.
The shepherd, rambling valleys white and wide
With new sensations his old memories fills
When hedges left at night, no more descried
Are turned to one white sweep of curving hills
And trees turned bushes, half their bodies hide.
 
I hope some of you will read John Clare’s poems, if you haven’t before.
Thank you for listening.