John

Clare
(13 July 1793 – 20 May 1864)

"The Northamptonshire
Peasant Poet"

Born the son of a farm labourer at Helpston (which, at the time of his birth,
was in the Soke of Peterborough, which itself was part of Northamptonshire)
near Peterborough. His poetry underwent a major re-evaluation in the late
20th century and he is often now considered to be one of the most important
19th-century poets.

Life
Clare became an agricultural labourer whilst still a child, however he attended
school in Glinton church until he was twelve.

In his early adult years, Clare became a pot-boy in the Blue Bell public house
and fell in love with Mary Joyce; but her father, a prosperous farmer, forbade
her to meet him. Subsequently he was a gardener at Burghley House. He
enlisted in the militia, tried camp life with Gypsies, and worked in Pickworth as
a lime burner in 1817, but in the following year he was obliged to accept
parish relief. Malnutrition stemming from childhood would be the main culprit
behind his 5-ft stature and contributed to his poor physical health in later life.

Clare had bought a copy of Thomson's Seasons out of his scanty earnings
and had begun to write poems. In an attempt to hold off his parents' eviction
from their home, Clare offered his poems to a local bookseller named Edward
Drury. Clare eventually befriended the author of Seasons who introduced his
poems to his cousin John Taylor of the publishing firm of Taylor & Hessey,
who had published the work of John Keats. They issued the Poems
Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820. This book was highly praised,
and in the next year his Village Minstrel and other Poems were published.
Fame, in the shape of curious visitors, broke the tenor of his life, and he
indulged more freely the convivial habits that he had formed: mainly
alcoholism, in which Clare eloquently described as his "taste for ale".

Clare became possessed of £45 annually, a sum far beyond what he had ever
earned; but new wants made his income insufficient, and in 1823 he was
nearly penniless. The Shepherd's Calendar (1827) met with little success,
which was not increased by his hawking it himself. As he worked again on the
fields his health temporarily improved; but he soon became seriously ill. Earl
FitzWilliam presented him with a new cottage and a piece of ground, but Clare
could not settle in his new home.

Clare began to find himself discontent with the fact that his style of poetry was
no longer in the current "fashion", but also felt that he did not belong with
other peasants. Clare once wrote "I live here among the ignorant like a lost
man in fact like one whom the rest seemes careless of having anything to do
with—they hardly dare talk in my company for fear I should mention them in
my writings and I find more pleasure in wandering the fields than in musing
among my silent neighbours who are insensible to everything but toiling and
talking of it and that to no purpose."

Clare was constantly torn between the two worlds of literary London and his
often illiterate neighbours, between the need to write poetry and the need for
money to feed and clothe his children. His health began to suffer, and he had
bouts of severe depression, which became worse after his sixth child was
born in 1830 and his poetry sold less well. His friends and his London patrons
clubbed together to move the family in 1832 to a larger cottage with a
smallholding in the village of Northborough, not far from Helpston, thinking
that would help him. However, this only made him feel more alienated.

His last and best work, the Rural Muse (1835), was noticed favorably by
Christopher North and other reviewers, but this was not enough to support his
wife and seven children. Clare's mental health began to worsen. As his
alcohol consumption steadily increased and his dissatisfaction with his own
identity, Clare's behaviour became more erratic. A more notable instance of
this behaviour was demonstrated in his interruption of a performance of The
Merchant of Venice, in which Clare verbally assaulted Shylock. In July 1837
he was finally removed to a Dr Matthew Allen's High Beach Private Asylum
near Loughton in Epping Forest.

In 1841, Clare left the asylum in Essex, to walk home, believing that he was to
meet his first love Mary Joyce; Clare was convinced that he was married with
children to her. He did not believe her family when they told him she had died
three years earlier. He remained free, mostly at home in Helpston, for the five
months to follow, but eventually the doctors were called in, between
Christmas and New Year in 1841, and Clare was committed to the
Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. He remained here for the rest of his
life, encouraged and helped to write. Here he wrote poetry, including possibly
his most famous poem, I Am. He died 20 May 1864, in his 71st year. His
remains were returned to Helpston for burial in St Botolph’s churchyard.
Poetic Themes
Rural Village Life

Birds and Beasts

Love

The Politics of Ecology

Clare grew up during a period of massive changes in both town and

countryside. The Industrial Revolution blackened urban areas. Many former
agricultural workers, including children, went to work in factories because of
the rural poverty caused by the Napoleonic wars, which kept wages down but
forced prices up. The Agricultural Revolution saw pastures ploughed up, trees
and hedges uprooted, the nearby fens drained and the common land
enclosed. This destruction of a centuries-old way of life distressed Clare
deeply.

His early work delights both in nature and the cycle of the rural year. Poems
such as Winter Evening, Haymaking and Wood Pictures in Summer celebrate
the beauty of the world and the certainties of rural life, where animals must be
fed and crops harvested. Poems such as Little Trotty Wagtail show his sharp
observation of wildlife, though The Badger is unsentimental about the place of
animals in the countryside. At this time, he often used poetic forms such as
the sonnet and the rhyming couplet. His later poetry tends to be more
meditative and use forms similar to the folks songs and ballads of his youth.
An example of this is Evening.

Clare's descriptions of rural scenes show a keen and loving appreciation of

nature; his knowledge of the natural world went far beyond that of the major
Romantic poets, and his love-songs and ballads charm by their genuine
feeling. There is more to Clare than animals and rural prettiness, however.
Although it is regularly observed that his poem I Am shows a metaphysical
depth on a par with his more illustrious contemporaries many of his pre-
asylum poems deal with intricate play on the nature of linguistics, while his
bird's nest poems illustrate the self-awareness, and obsession with the
creative process that captivated the romantics in a truly individual style.
The Lament of Swordy Well

Petitioners are full of prayers

To fall in pity's way
But if her hand the gift forbears
They'll sooner swear than pray
They're not the worst to want who lurch
On plenty with complaints
No more then those who go to church
Are e'er the better saints

I hold no hat to beg a mite

Nor pick it up when thrown
Nor limping leg I hold in sight
But pray to keep my own
Where profit gets his clutches in
There's little he will leave
Gain stooping for a single pin
Will stick it on his sleeve

For passers-by I never pin

No troubles to my breast
Nor carry round some names to win
More money from the rest
I'm Swordy Well a piece of land
That's fell upon the town
Who worked me till I couldn't stand
And crush me now I'm down

In parish bounds I well may wail

Reduced to every shift
Pity may grieve at trouble's tale
But cunning shares the gift
Harvest with plenty on his brow
Leaves losses' taunts with me
Yet gain comes yearly with the plough
And will not let me be

Alas dependence thou'rt a brute

Want only understands
His feelings wither branch and root
That falls in parish hands.
The muck that clouts the ploughman's shoe
The moss that hides the stone,
Now I'm become the parish due,
Is more than I can own

Though I'm no man yet any wrong

Some sort of right may seek
And I am glad if e'en a song
Gives me room to speak
I've got among such grubbing geer
And such a hungry pack
If I brought harvests twice a year

They'd bring me nothing back

When war their tyrant-prices got
I trembled with alarms
They fell and saved my little spot
Or towns had turned to farms
Let profit keep a humble place
That gentry may be known
Let pedigrees their honours trace
And toil enjoy its own

The silver springs grown naked dykes

Scarce own a bunch of rushes
When grain got high the tasteless tykes
Grubbed up trees, banks, and bushes
And me, they turned me inside out
For sand and grit and stones
And turned my old green hills about
And pickt my very bones

These things that claim my own as theirs

Were born by yesterday
But ere I fell to town affairs
I were as proud as they
I kept my horses, cows, and sheep
And built the town below
Ere they had cat or dog to keep
And then to use me so

Parish allowance gaunt and dread

Had it the earth to keep
Would even pine the bees to dead
To save an extra keep
Pride's workhouse is a place that yields
From poverty its gains
And mines a workhouse for the fields
A-starving the remains

The bees flye round in feeble rings

And find no blossom bye
Then thrum their almost weary wings
Upon the moss and die
Rabbits that find my hills turned o'er
Forsake my poor abode
They dread a workhouse like the poor
And nibble on the road

If with a clover bottle now

Spring dares to lift her head
The next day brings the hasty plough
And makes me misery's bed
The butterflyes may wir and come
I cannot keep 'em now
Nor can they bear my parish home
That withers on my brow

No, now not e'en a stone can lie

I'm just what e'er they like
My hedges like the winter flye
And leave me but the dyke
My gates are thrown from off the hooks
The parish thoroughfare
Lord he that's in the parish books
Has little wealth to spare

I couldn't keep a dust of grit

Nor scarce a grain of sand
But bags and carts claimed every bit
And now they've got the land
I used to bring the summer's life
To many a butterflye
But in oppression's iron strife

Dead tussocks bow and sigh

I've scarce a nook to call my own
For things that creep or flye
The beetle hiding 'neath a stone
Does well to hurry bye
Stock eats my struggles every day
As bare as any road
He's sure to be in something's way
If e'er he stirs abroad

I am no man to whine and beg

But fond of freedom still
I hang no lies on pity's peg
To bring a grist to mill
On pity's back I needn't jump
My looks speak loud alone
My only tree they've left a stump
And nought remains my own

My mossy hills gain's greedy hand

And more than greedy mind
Levels into a russet land
Nor leaves a bent behind
In summers gone I bloomed inpride
Folks came for miles to prize
My flowers that bloomed nowhere beside
And scarce believed their eyes

Yet worried with a greedy pack

They rend and delve and tear
The very grass from off my back
I've scarce a rag to wear
Gain takes my freedom all away
Since its dull suit I wore
And yet scorn vows I never pay
And hurts me more and more

And should the price of grain get high -

Lord help and keep it low -
I shan't possess a single flye
Or get a weed to grow
I shan't possess a yad of ground
To bid a mouse to thrive
For gain has put me in a pound
I scarce can keep alive

I own I'm poor like many more

But the the poor num live
And many came for miles before
For what I had to give
But since I fell upon the town
They pass me with a sigh
I've scarce the room to say 'Sit down'
And so they wander bye

Though now I seem so full of clack

Yet when ye're riding bye
The very birds upon my back
Are not more fain to flye
I feel so lorn in this disgrace
God send the grain to fall
I am the oldest in the place
And the worst-served of all

Lord bless ye I was kind to all

And poverty in me
Could always find a humble stall
A rest and lodging free
Poor bodys with an hungry ass
I welcomed many a day
And gave him tether-room and grass
And never said him nay

There was a time my bit of ground

Made freemen of the slave
The ass no pindar'd dare to pound
When I his supper gave
The gipsey's camp was not affraid
I made his dwelling free
Till vile enclosure came and made
A parish slave of me

The gipseys further on sojourn

No parish bounds they like
No sticks I own and would earth burn
I shouldn't own a dyke
I am no friend to lawless work
Nor would a rebel be
And why I call a Christian turk
Is they are turks to me

And if I could but find a friend

With no deceit to sham
Who'd send me some few sheep to tend
And leave me as I am
To keep my hills from cart and plough
And strife of mongrel men
And as a spring found me find me now
I should look up agen

And save his Lordship's woods, that past

The day of danger dwell
Of all the fields I am the last
That my own face can tell
Yet what with stone pits' delving holes
And strife to buy and sell
My name will quickly be the whole
That's left of Swordy Well.