Malcolm Guite turns to John Clare, who notices the unnoticed
(Poet’s Corner, Church Times - 6th March 2026)
March month of “many weathers” wildly comes
In hail and snow and rain and threatning hums
And floods. . .
JOHN CLARE, that close observer and celebrant of the seasons, is, as always, right. The past week or two have, indeed, seen many weathers wildly come, as February turns to March. But, unlike Coleridge or even Wordsworth, Clare’s account of the turn of the year in The Shepherd’s Calendar is as much about the life of ordinary labourers in the fields as it is about nature herself.
His poem is crowded with figures who, even in his lifetime, would be driven from the fields and exchange their traditional jobs for new and grimmer labour in the towns and factories. He sees “the ploughman on the elting soil” — elting being a Northampton dialect word for persistent labouring, as though the soil itself were working with the ploughman. He sees the shepherd who
in his path will spye
The little daisey in the wet grass lye
That to the peeping sun enlivens gay
Like Labour smiling on an holiday.
He sees the
woodman that in wild seclusion dwells
Wi chopping toil the coming spring decieves
Of many dancing shadows flowers and leaves
And in his pathway down the mossy wood
Crushes wi hasty feet full many a bud.
This is no mere idle celebration of nature, such as Wordsworth with his daffodils, for here the necessities of labour sometimes crush the buds that other poets only contemplate. Then comes a vivid little vignette of the hedger:
Muffld in baffles leathern coat and gloves
The hedger toils oft scaring rustling doves
From out the hedgerows. . .
Then, surely not far from the hedger, comes the ditcher:
The stooping ditcher in the water stands
Letting the furrowd lakes from off the lands
Or splashing cleans the pasture brooks of mud. . .
These last two have a particular resonance for me, as, when I was training for the priesthood, I did a course on rural ministry, part of which was a placement with a Herefordshire hill farmer who, perhaps to tease, perhaps to prove the mettle of this callow youth from Cambridge, set me all day to hedging and ditching in the March rain with a couple of his older labourers, whose skill at both jobs I admired and tried, but failed, to emulate.
In Clare’s day, not even the elderly were spared the hard labour of the season. He gives us a vivid glimpse of an old woman at work gathering watercress:
The water cresses neath the wave is seen
Which the old woman gladly drags to land
Wi reaching long rake in her tottering hand.
We might read Clare now with some tint of cosy nostalgia for the old ways of the land, now lost to progress and urbanisation; but that is not how Clare should be read. Instead, we should wonder what poetry he might be writing now were he among us. I’d wager that he would be making equally vivid and closely observed poems about the dustmen on an early round in their council overalls, or the roadworkers with their ear-defenders, mastering the hideous noise and vibration of jackhammers while the cars swerve too close past them when the lights change.
His poetry, then, as it would be now, is a loving observation of ordinary life, of unnoticed and often poorly rewarded labourers, doing the work that we take for granted, but without which none of us would live our more comfortable lives.
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