Selected Poems Read Online

Selected Poems

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

DAYS AND SEASONS

LANDSCAPES WITH FIGURES

BIRDS AND BEASTS

LOVES

CHANGES AND CONTRADICTIONS

‘MADHOUSES, PRISONS, WHORESHOPS ...’

‘THE ENGLISH BASTILLE’

NOTES

GLOSSARY

INDEX OF FIRST LINES

INDEX OF TITLES

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.

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This selection first published in Penguin Books 1990 Reprinted with first line and tide indexes 2000 5

Copyright in the unpublished and in much of the published work of John Clare is owned by Professor Eric Robinson who has together with Oxford University Press authorized this publication. Requests for permission to reproduce any of the poems in this anthology should be addressed to Curtis Brown Group Ltd, 162-168 Regent Street, London WIR STB. The editor and the publishers thank Professor Robinson, the Oxford University Press and Curtis Brown Ltd, London, for particular permission to reproduce the following poems: ‘Summer Evening’, ‘Crows in Spring’, ‘Sunday with Shepherds and Herdboys’, ‘Snow Storm’, ‘To the Snipe’, ‘The Martin’, ‘The Hedgehog’, ‘The Fox’, ‘The Badger’, ‘Dedication to Mary’, ‘I’ve ran the furlong’, ‘The Mores’ (from Seleaed Poems and Prose of JohnClare, Oxford University Press, copyright © Eric Robinson 1967), and ’The Lament of Swordy Well’ (from Oxford Authors John Clare, Oxford University Press, copyright © Eric Robinson 1984).

eISBN : 978-1-101-16044-2

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My most immediate debt is to friends who have offered generous encouragement: David Erdman, Marilyn Gaull, Hugh Haughton, Seamus Heaney, John Hollo-way and Adam Phillips. I am indebted also to the perceptive critical commentaries of Tim Chilcott and Tom Frosch; to Mark Storey’s splendid edition of Clare’s letters; to Kelsey Thornton for perceptive advice; to John Maynard for his magnanimity; and to Eileen Joyce, Eleanor Nicholes and Jean Paira-Pemberton for their acute observations on Clare’s mind.

I am pleased to acknowledge the generous cooperation of the librarians at Northampton, Peterborough, the Bodleian Library and New York University Library; also of Microform Academic of Wakefield, especially of Michelle Mortimer. My work was supported in part by a grant from New York University’s Research Challenge Fund, and for this I am grateful.

My thanks are due also to Paul Keegan for the invitation, to Peter Sharpe for the loan of his eyes, and to my wife, Judith, for she-knows-what.

I wish to dedicate this book to: Jerome Bruner, David Hammond and Ted Hughes.

Geoffrey Summerfield

New York, 1988

INTRODUCTION

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.

In his maturity as a poet, in his middle years, 1820-35, we see him achieving a precarious balancing act, holding in suspense these conflicting elements, both achieving a coherent literariness and also finding the confidence, the resourcefulness, the integrity, to acknowledge and incorporate in his poetry the gifts of his oral tradition, both of story and song.

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.