John Clare, peasant poet, the son of a poor labourer, was born at Helpstone, near Peterborough, July 13, 1793. After some scanty schooling, he began to do outdoor work in his seventh year, and for eleven months was an under-gardener at Burghley Park; meanwhile he studied Thomson’s “Seasons,” and began to cultivate verse writing. He enlisted in the militia (1812), associated with Gypsies, in 1817 worked at a lime-kiln, but was discharged for wasting his time in scribbling, and had to apply for parish relief. His “Poems, descriptive of Rural Life” (1821), had a good reception; but though the Marquis of Exeter and other patrons secured him £45 a year, he continued unfortunate. He died in the lunatic asylum, Northampton, 20th May 1864.
Personal
For the boisterous sports and amusements which form the usual delight of village youth, Clare had neither strength nor relish; his mother found it necessary to drive him from the chimney corner to exercise and to play, whence he quickly returned, contemplative and silent. His parents—we speak from knowledge—were apprehensive for his mind as well as his health; not knowing how to interpret, or to what cause to refer these habits so opposite to those of other boys of his condition; and when, a few years later, they found him hourly employed in writing—and writing verses, too,—“he gear was not mended” in their estimation. “When he was fourteen or fifteen,” says Dame Clare, “he would show me a piece of paper, printed sometimes on one side, and scrawled all over on the other, and he would say, ‘Mother, this is worth so much; and I used to say to him, ‘Aye, boy, it looks as if it warr!’—but I thought he was wasting his time.”… The clouds which had hung so heavily over the youth of Clare, far from dispersing, grew denser and darker as he advanced toward manhood. His father, who had been the constant associate of his labours, became more and more infirm, and he was constrained to toil alone, and far beyond his strength, to obtain a mere subsistence. It was at this cheerless moment, he composed “What is Life?” in which he has treated a common subject with an earnestness, a solemnity, and an originality deserving of all praise: some of the lines have a terseness of expression and a nervous freedom of versification not unworthy of Drummond, or of Cowley.
We recently visited him by the courteous permission of the medical superintendent, who generally refuses the same favor to others, because he deems, and rightly too, that his patients should not be made an “exhibition” of. Passing through several of the wards, we were ushered into what we at first deemed to be a gentleman’s private sitting-room, but which was the ordinary sitting-chamber of the better class of patients and which appeared very cosy and comfortable with its mahogany chairs, table, and couch, warm soft carpets, and cheerful fire. Several patients were lounging about, and in a recess formed by one of the windows, which command a beautiful view of the large and spacious gardens belonging to the establishment, sat John Clare. Time had dealt gently with the poet, who—making allowances for his increased years—bore a very striking resemblance to the portrait of him prefixed to “The Village Minstrel.” He was rather short in stature, with a very large forehead, and mild, benevolent-looking features. On our approaching him, we found him to be extremely taciturn, but the attendant informed us that in general Clare was good humoured, obedient, and cheerful.
In the spring of 1864, in the Northamptonshire General County Lunatic Asylum, after a sad incarceration of about twenty-three years, an appendix to a previous incarceration in a private asylum, from which he escaped, died John Clare. In the lucid intervals which shone upon him, he had always expressed a wish to sleep his last sleep in the churchyard of his native village, Helpstone. Accordingly, when his spirit had fled, the superintendent of the asylum wrote to the Earl Fitzwilliam, one of the great peers of England, and whose property lies immediately in the neighborhood of Helpston, asking for the grant of a small sum to carry the wish of the poor deceased into effect. The illustrious peer briefly replied by a refusal, implying that the deceased died as a pauper, and should be buried in the pauper’s burial-ground. There were others who judged more generously than the noble earl, and it is a satisfaction to feel that this great indignity was not perpetrated towards the remains of one of the sweetest village nightingales that ever warbled the notes of pastoral melody in English verse. A requisite burial fund was raised in a few days; the poet’s body was conveyed to Helpstone, and now lies beneath the shade of a sycamore tree, tombed over only by the green grass and the eternal vault of the sky…. Never have literature and labour been more remarkably combined than in the instance of John Clare, the Northamptonshire peasant; perhaps none who have attained any degree of eminence in literature from the lowly walks of life ever had to contend with difficulties more stern and severe than this singularly beautiful soul.
I recall him, poor fellow, with his huge, over-burdening head, that might have dreamed dreams and seen visions, but obviously was not the throne of productive thought. His life was cheerless, or gladdened only by a brief ray of sunshine that speedily gave way to blacker and blacker clouds of calamity, under the gloomy influence of which his mind sank: and after long years of confinement he died in the insane asylum at Northampton, the town with which his name is inseparably associated—though not to its honor. He was not buried in a pauper’s grave; a few pounds were kindly subscribed to preserve his body from that indignity; that, and a small annuity purchased for him by subscription, while he was yet free from the most terrible of maladies, is the sum of what his country did for the poor peasant-boy who lived through penury and suffering to leave his mark in the literary annals of his time.
General
Clare has latterly been patronized with a degree of liberality which does credit to the taste and benevolence of those who have so kindly interested themselves in his behalf. Injudicious friends have placed him by the side of Bloomfield and Burns; but he is many removes from either; although, at the same time, we admit that some of his effusions … evince great nature, and considerable sweetness of versification.
John Clare often reminds us of James Grahame. They are two of our most artless poets. Their versification is mostly very sweet, though rather flowing forth according to a certain fine natural sense of melody, than construed on any principles of music. So, too, with their imagery, which seems seldom selected with much care; so that, while it is always true to nature, often possesses a charm from its appearing to rise up of itself, and with little or no effort on the poet’s part to form a picture, it is not unfrequently chargeable with repetition—some times, perhaps, with a sameness which, but for the inherent interest in the objects themselves, might be felt a little wearisome—there is so much still-life. They are both most affectionately disposed towards all manner of birds. Grahame’s “Birds of Scotland” is a delightful poem; yet its best passages are not superior to some of Clare’s about the same charming creatures—and they are both ornithologists after Aubudon’s and our own heart.
His poems were not the mere reflexes of his reading. He had studied for himself in the fields, and in the woods, and by the side of brooks. I very much doubt if there could be found in his poems a single commonplace image, or a description made up of hackneyed elements. In that respect, his poems are original, and have even a separate value, as a sort of calendar (in extent, of course, a very limited one) of many rural appearances, of incidents in the fields not elsewhere noticed, and of the loveliest flowers most felicitously described. The description is often true even to a botanical eye; and in that, perhaps, lies the chief defect; not properly in the scientific accuracy, but that, in searching after this too earnestly, the feeling is sometimes too much neglected. However, taken as a whole, his poems have a very novel quality of merit, though a quality too little, I fear, in the way of public notice.
His third publication, too, “The Rural Muse,” in spite of its unpromising title, more than justified all that had been done for him. The improvement was most remarkable. That he should gain a greater command over language, a choicer selection of words, and the knowledge of grammatical construction, which he had wanted before, was to be expected; but the habit of observation seemed to have increased in fineness and accuracy in proportion as he gained the power of expression, and the delicacy of his sentiment kept pace with the music of his versification. What can be closer to nature than his description of the nightingale’s nest?
Clare is Bloomfield’s successor, but he is very far his superior, dwelling among the ever-varying scenes of nature. He is not merely a rustic poet or a rural bard; such poets take merely the impression of a georgic world, but they do not reflect themselves; their bucolics abound in prettinesses and generalities, without the boldness of generalization. Clare has more fully individualized his scenery than any poet of his class, always excepting Burns. It is the poetry of rural life and taste, but rural life with the dignity of the man, not with the rudeness or manners of the clown. It is worth some inquiry what makes the evident distinction between the methods of Cowper and Wordsworth, and Keats and Tennyson, in describing nature; and between these, again, and our humbler friend of whom we are now speaking. All love the country, but few love it as Clare loves it; yet it seems indispensable to the proper appreciation of rural scenery that we should not only take our walks there, but find our work there. The poems of Clare are now, even in literary circles, almost unknown, and quite unreferred to. Their purity, their excessive modesty, their intense devotion to nature in the woods and fields, in an age when the woods and fields have been comparatively forsaken: these may be assigned as some of the reasons for the obscurity which has gathered round the name of one of the sweetest singers of the children of labour—one of the saddest names in the Peerage of Poverty.
John Clare is entitled to a high place, if not to the highest, among the “uneducated” poets of England. His keen observation of nature amounted to a genius; his delicacy in painting natural objects, whether a flower, a tree, a sunset, or a spring scene, was next to marvellous. He owed little to books, but wrote from his heart. He saw things with the eye of a true poet, and as he observed, so did he write.
Clare, in his humble way, and not consciously sharing in it, was a helper in that reaction against the conventionality and stiff formalism of the Johnsonian era in English poetry, which was led by such men as Wordsworth and Coleridge and Scott. He was not a mannerist nor an imitator. Perhaps, if he had possessed a wider knowledge of books when he began to write, he might have been less original; as it was, his verses aimed only to describe what a genuine lover of nature saw and felt—not merely her more obvious and general aspects, but many such minute charms as no other poet to this day has thought worthy of embalming. The ant, at its toil; the lady-bug, preening its gay wings on the bending grass-spear; the felled tree, that he fain would have left to “grow old in picturesque decay;” the frog, wetting his freckled sides as he leaped across the dewy meadow; the evening daisies, that “button into buds;”—the rain-dripping oaks, that “print crimpling dimples” on the lake; the glow-worm, apostrophized as a
| “Tasteful illumination of the night, | |
| Bright, scattered, twinkling star of spangled earth”: |
Clare’s sonnets are irregular in structure, and in a sense they are only fourteen-line poems. They might as well as not be better, or worse, for being two or three lines shorter or longer. There is no inevitableness about them: one feels that the choice of vehicle has been purely arbitrary,—in a word, that they have not that essential characteristic—adequacy of sonnet-motive. Like all his work, however, they are characterised by the same winsome affection for and knowledge of the nature amidst which he spent his life. Clare’s poetry is often like a sunny and windy day bursting through the gloom of late winter.
Between Clare and Burns there is the difference (besides that of intrinsic power) between the most depressed English labourer and the independent Scottish farmer. Clare’s poetry is modeled upon that of the cultivated classes, instead of expressing the sentiments of his own class. Lamb advised him to avoid his rustic “slang,” and recommended Shenstone’s “Schoolmistress” in preference to “Goody’s own language.” Clare becomes less vernacular in his later poems, and the advice may have suited the man…. Though Clare shows fine natural taste, and has many exquisite descriptive touches, his poetry does not rise to a really high level; and, though extraordinary under the circumstances, requires for its appreciation that the circumstances should be remembered.
The poetry of Clare is what might have been expected from his long familiarity with rural scenery, and his intimate knowledge of country life. Simple as the song of a bird, it is best described by Milton’s phrase, “native wood-notes wild,” for art it has none, and only such music as lingered in the memory of Clare from the few poets that he had read. It abounds with picturesque details, which declare the naturalist as well as that of the poet; it sparkles with happy epithets, and to those who delight in nature for its own sake, and not for the human quality which the present race of poets are striving to infuse into it, it is winsome and charming. It is not the kind of poetry to criticise, for it is full of faults, but to read generously and tenderly, remembering the lowly life of Clare, his want of education, his temptations, his struggles, his sorrow and suffering, and his melancholy end.
This poetry has a very distinctive value of its own. Its minute and loving observation of nature is exceptionally accurate; and its pictures of the English peasant in his everyday life, agricultural pursuits, rural sports, fairy lore, hopes, fears, and hard struggles for daily bread, are those of one who, born in that class, had the soul and exceptionally keen sensibility of a poet. The verse is like a tender, modest, wild flower, with the dew of morning fresh upon it—like the note of a bird among green leaves. You are in the open air while you read this poetry, with the pulse stirred and the sense quickened. Yet it was not until he had acquired range and fluency of expression from books that he gave this deep intuition voice—though in the “Shepherd’s Calendar,” and even in the “Village Minstrel” volume, he occasionally did.
It is pure landscape painting, like that of Keats in youth, though beneath that in power. Such is the landscape of his early “Summer Evening.”… This may seem an easy style, almost a mere catalogue. Let those who think so, try! That delicate minute truth to fact; that pure simple sincerity of touch, and every word in its natural place; yet the indescribable something that makes poetry, poetry preserved; by inborn gift only, not labour ever so strenuous, can this be effected. But the unhappy poet’s best gifts in song came during the twenty years and more of later life which he spent in an asylum. During that long but inevitable imprisonment sanity seems to have returned to him at times; but accompanied as it was by consciousness of where he was, and why he was there, I know not whether such recovery can be counted gain. No poetry known to me has a sadness more absolute than Clare’s asylum songs, reverting with what pathetic yearning to the village scenes of his hard-worked youth!
