A Message from the
President of the John Clare Society
This was John Clare’s church. He was baptised in it and buried beside
it. He wrote of its “wholesome and
reasonable admonitions” but its message reached him via its bells as it did so
many countrymen.
The shepherds and
the herding swains
Keep their Sabbath
on the plains ..
For them the church
bells vainly call
Fields are their
church and house and all
Amongst so many things, Clare was also an archaeologist
and his wandering gaze would have travelled round this ancient building,
settling maybe on the carved stone leaves.
It is a moving experience to see what a great writer saw, to hear the
music which he heard. Most of those who
Clare put into his poetry sat here, were wed here, played around here. Charles Mossop the Vicar was good to him
here, extraordinary parishioner that he was.
Clare’s God would break all parochial bounds in the majestic statement
‘I Am’.
Ronald Blythe
The above text appears on the new new display about John Clare and St. Botolph's Church Helpston - to be dedicated at the John Clare Society Festival Service on the 14th July 2013.
'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 oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd 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.
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd 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.
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