Next week I'll mark John
Clare Day. This great poet showed how the era of greed began with
the enclosure of the land.
The land around Helpston,
just to the north of Peterborough in Northamptonshire, now ranks among the most
dismal and regularised tracts of countryside in Europe. But when the
poet John Clare was born in 1793, it swarmed
with life. Clare describes species whose presence there is almost
unimaginable today. Corncrakes hid among the crops, ravens nested in
a giant oak, nightjars circled the heath, the meadows sparkled with glow
worms. Wrynecks still bred in old woodpecker holes. In
the woods and brakes the last wildcats clung on.
The land was densely
peopled. While life was hard and spare, it was also, he records,
joyful and thrilling. The meadows resounded with children pranking
and frolicking and gathering cowslips for their May Day games; the woods were
alive with catcalls and laughter; around the shepherds' fires, people sang
ballads and told tales. We rightly remark on the poverty and injustice
of rural labour at that time; we also forget its wealth of fellowship.
All this Clare notes in
tremulous bewitching detail, in the dialect of his own people. His
father was a casual farm labourer, his family never more than a few days' wages
from the poorhouse. Clare himself, from early childhood, scraped a
living in the fields. He was schooled capriciously, and only until
the age of 12, but from his first bare contact fell wildly in love with the
written word. His early poems are remarkable not only for the way in
which everything he sees flares into life, but also for his ability to pour his
mingled thoughts and observations on to the page as they occur, allowing you,
as perhaps no other poet has done, to watch the world from inside his head. Read The
Nightingale's Nest, one of the finest poems in the English language, and
you will see what I mean.
And then he sees it fall
apart. Between 1809 and 1820, Acts of Enclosure granted the local
landowners permission to fence the fields, the heaths and woods, excluding the
people who had worked and played in them. Almost everything Clare
loved was torn away. The ancient trees were felled, the scrub and
furze were cleared, the rivers were canalised, the marshes drained, the natural
curves of the land straightened and squared. Farming became more
profitable, but many of the people of Helpston – especially those who depended
on the commons for their survival – were deprived of their living. The
places in which the people held their ceremonies and celebrated the passing of
the seasons were fenced off. The community, like the land, was
parcelled up, rationalised, atomised. I have watched the same
process breaking up the Maasai of East Africa.
Clare documents both the
destruction of place and people and the gradual collapse of his own state of
mind. "Inclosure came and trampled on the grave / Of labour's rights and
left the poor a slave … And birds and trees and flowers without a name / All
sighed when lawless law's enclosure came."
As Jonathan Bate records in his magnificent biography, there
were several possible causes of the "madness" that had Clare removed
to an asylum in 1837: bipolar disorder, a blow to the head, malaria (then a
common complaint on the edge of the fens). But it seems to me that a
contributing factor must have been the loss of almost all he knew and
loved. His work is a remarkable document of life before and after
social and environmental collapse, and the anomie that
resulted.
What Clare suffered was the
fate of indigenous peoples torn from their land and belonging everywhere. His
identity crisis, descent into mental agony and alcohol abuse, are familiar
blights in reservations and outback shanties the world over. His
loss was surely enough to drive almost anyone mad; our loss surely enough to
drive us all a little mad.
For while economic rationalisation
and growth have helped to deliver us from a remarkable range of ills, they have
also torn us from our moorings, atomised and alienated us, sent us out, each in
his different way, to seek our own identities. We have gained
unimagined freedoms, we have lost unimagined freedoms – a paradox Clare
explores in his wonderful poem The
Fallen Elm. Our environmental crisis could be said to have begun
with the enclosures. The current era of greed, privatisation and the
seizure of public assets was foreshadowed by them: they prepared the soil for
these toxic crops.
Earlier this year the
writer and poet Paul Kingsnorth suggested that we should celebrate Barnes Night, to
mark the life of another neglected genius, William Barnes. His
themes – an intense engagement with nature, the destruction caused by the
enclosures, even unrequited love for a woman called Mary – are remarkably
similar to Clare's. But to say that he cannot hold a candle to Clare
is no disrespect to him, for this puts him in the company of all the other
pastoral poets England has produced.
John Clare, unlike Robert
Burns (Tam O'Shanter, The Cotter's Saturday Night, Death and Doctor Hornbook),
is a poet of the day. So a Clare Night, whose absence Jonathan Bate
laments, does not feel quite right. I'm not going to wait for anyone
else. As far as I'm concerned, 13 July is Clare Day, and I'll be
raising a glass to celebrate and mourn him. I hope you'll join me.
Published in The Guardian
in July 2012 -
George Monbiot
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment