Ronnie, musing in bed.

[Image: Peter de Wint (1784-1849)]

It is July 1827; so what would be happening?  The bedroom is centuries older than this.  It is about six o’clock, and, outside, the white cat lifts up her face piteously.  She thinks she is passing away due to starvation.  Three horses take turns to gulp water at the tank, and the oaks promise heat. All this could have been happening.

I check in John Clare’s The Shepherd’s Calendar, and am relieved to find that the shepherd is flat on his back reading a book, for our view of the past is one of incessant labour.  But what work there is, is a romp, for the meadows “are mad with noise / Of laughing maids and shouting boys / Making up the withering hay”.  I stare down on the farmyard, now a sea of tall nettles, in whose depths lie the footings of pigsties, barns, and the stackyard itself.  Not a murmur.  Not a bird.  Just a cat praying for a last bite.

(From Ronnie Blythe’s ‘Word from Wormingford’, sometime in 2009)

The poem?

July, from the Shepherds Calendar :

July the month of summers prime
Again resumes her busy time
Scythes tinkle in each grassy dell
Where solitude was wont to dwell
& meadows they are mad with noise
Of laughing maids & shouting boys
Making up the withering hay
With merry hearts as light as play
The very insects on the ground
So nimbly bustle all around
Among the grass or dusty soil
They seem partakers in the toil
The very landscap reels with life
While mid the busy stir & strife
Of industry the shepherd still
Enjoys his summer dreams at will
Bent oer his hook or listless laid
Beneath the pastures willow shade
Whose foliage shines so cool & grey
Amid the sultry hues of day
As if the mornings misty veil
Yet lingered in their shadows pale
Or lolling in a musing mood
On mounds where saxon castles stood

(lines 1-24)

"Along the road were coupld maid & swain"

Along the road were coupld maid & swain
& dick from dolly now for gifts did sue
Hed gen her ribbons & he deemd again
Some kind return as nothing but his due
& he told things as ploughmen rarely knew
Bout breaking hearts & pains—a mighty spell
Her sunday clo'hs might damage wi the dew
She quite forgot them while he talkd so well
She gave the contest up at last to what no words dare tell

(Village Minstrel LXIX, but with Clare's original ending)

The poem is the subject of a letter from Clare to Taylor dated Sunday, 17th February 1821, in which he says this, "I have got the verse from Stamford & alterd it    I think just such as you can wish     no better to be done -- at least indelicacy is lost or the delicate will be damd puzzld to attribut that to it"

It is clear that the text in VM was a compromise after 'negotiation' between Taylor and Clare.  Clare went on to say in his letter, "I am pleasd with it by throwing such disguise over it to think how it will wrack the prudes to find fault     there is somthing in it but theyll know not were to get at it -- tis quite delicate now" (!)

Rather like "To an early cowslip" -- also in Volume I of VM -- which Clare managed to slip past Taylor unaltered, who entirely missed the erotic nature of the subject.

Song - "Sweet comes the morning"

[Image: One of Lady Clementina Hawarden's lovely daughters, photographed around 1860]

Sweet comes the morning,

In natures adorning,

And bright shines the dew, on the buds o' the thorn,

Where Mary Ann rambles,

Through sloe trees, and brambles,

She's sweeter than wild flowers that open at morn;

She's a rose i' the dew love,

Nothing's sweeter than true love,

She's as gay as the poppy, that grows in the corn.

Her eyes they are bright love,

Her bosom's snow white love,

And her voice is like songs o' the birds in the grove:

She's handsome, and bonny,

And fairer than onny,

And her person and actions, are natures, and love,

She has the bloom o' a' roses,

She is the breath o' sweet posies,

She's a' pure as the brood i' the nest o' the dove.

O' earths fairest daughters,

Voiced like falling waters,

She walks down the meadows, than blossoms more fair,

Oh her bosom, right fair is,

And her rose cheek, so rare is,

And parted, and lovely, her glossy black hair:

Her bosom's soft whiteness,

 The sun in its brightness,

 Has never been seen, so bewitchingly fair.

The dewy grass glitters,

The house swallow twitters,

And through the sky floats, in its visions o' bliss,

The lark soars on high,

On cowslips the dews lie,

And the best day's o' summer, are nothing like this:

When Mary Ann rambles,

Th[r]oug[h] hedge rows, and brambles,

The soft gales o' Spring are the seasons o' bliss.

LP II 916 (Knight transcript)

John Clare and footpath walking

John Clare is the genius of the footpath. So poignant is his statement on the road that it tends to overlay his many and various statements on the footpaths. That wretched road journey, in July 1841, just after his forty-sixth birthday, when he was alone, weakening and penniless, and when he had to, as he said, “lay down with my head towards the north to show myself the steering point in the morning”, was a walk entirely isolated from every other walk he had made, or would ever make. 

Clare was more than acquainted with the way, that simplest, purest, most eloquent of ways, the footpath. And life only went wrong when he was diverted from it. He knew where he stood. He knew where he should walk. He knew when he should drop down. He knew what no other English writer knew or knows, which is what the English countryman's eyes saw, or sees, in its purity … we know that countless people, whilst on the way to work, or at work itself, are unwittingly visionary, and that they do not pass through these scenes on earth without taking them in, and wondering at them sometimes. What they -- or few of us do, is to drop down in our tracks to write because the need to write is overwhelming, as it is with writers. 

There were days when Clare could not follow the footpaths. On Thursday 23 September 1824 he writes: “A wet day did nothing but nurse my illness Coud not have walkd out had it been fine very disturbd in conscience about the troubles of being forcd to endure life & dye by inches & the anguish of leaving my childern & the dark porch of eternity whence none returns to tell the tale of their reception” (Natural History, p. 181) 

 But a few weeks later - what a change? Sunday 31 October 1824 “Took a walk got some branches of fee spindle tree with its pink colord berys that shine beautifully in the pale sun - found for fee first time 'fee herb true love' or 'one berry' [Paris quatrifollia} in Oxey Wood brought a root home to set in my garden” (Natural History, p. 197) 

 Did we but comprehend it, a great amount of our best poetry, novels and essays smell, not of the lamp, but of dust, mud, grit, pollen, and, I expect, sweat. 

Ronald Blythe ~ John Clare Society Journal, 14, 1995

There is a path a little path

There is a path a little path
Goes winding thru the meadow hay 
That leadeth on oer many a swath 
A sweet and pleasant way
& heres a stile to rest upon
& see the arches all anew
That carrys the traveller safely on 
When wild floods roar below 

"Hidden Treasures" (2016)

My Bonny Jane

The cows are from the pasture gone  The sheep are bleating in the pen

The path they travelled one by one  Is o'er the fallows beat agen

The sparrow chelps along the eaves  The whasp hums in the window pane

And I'll of labour take my leave  And gang and court young bonny Jane

The plums are misted o'er wi' dew  And rosey streaks the apples wear

But Jinney's cheeks a sweeter hue  Than either apple plumb or pear

The sun sinks o'er the willows grey  And clammy got the fields o' grain

And at her own home ends that day  I kissed the lips O bonny Jane

Her dark [hair] hangs in parted curl  Aside her forehead white as snow

She seemed a maid [of] other worlds  Too fair for any thing below

We stood beside the turnpike way  Such meetings seldom come again

That piece of animated clay  I clasped and kissed young bonny Jane

The mallow looked like satin flowers  Cut by some fond and fairy queen

The nettle fit for garden bowers  Did no where look so richly green

They cant' be common nettles sure  I said and stooped to look again

But love stood there blind eyes to cure  My ain sweet fairy bonny Jane

The bee resumed its honey tone around  And searched the alloes bloom

The windows too were open thrown  For buzing whasps to leave the room

Her hair was lappit in a comb  Then twisted glossy round again

That sweet white bosome was loves home  O my ain dear bonny Jane

The hens had clockit up to bed  The chicks where yet within the pen

The sparrows from the wheatfields sped  To Jinney's mossy eaves agen

O' Jinney is the bonny flower  The severest parting pain

Wi' many a vow and promise fair  I kissed and left my bonny Jane

The sun set red the weary crow  Flew homeward to the woods agen

The willows grey waved too and fro  And dews fell like a misty rain

She threw her kerchief o'er her hair  Her fond kiss cured the parting pain

Wi' many a vow and promise fair  I kissed and left my bonny Jane

LP II 745

KT ii 84-5

Another amazing poem from Clare's incarceration, that may be read as one, two or three separate poems.  Again in no collections apart from the Clarendon editions.

Some like to rocks gleam (excerpt)

Some like to rocks gleam in their wondering eye

Mid shoreless seas & some go swifter bye

Like mighty ships still charging on their way

To other ships move beautiful than they

Some shaped like boats their placid track pursue

Oer gentle billows of a different hue

Soft as the paper ships they often make

& float on curdling brook or meadow lake

Some white like palaces of marble seems

The towers of heaven they’re called in dreams

& which his waking fancys grandly shine
The abodes of one that instant suns divine

Hidden Treasures (2016)

edited Roger Rowe

Tall grows the nettle by the hedgeway side

Tall grows the nettle by the hedgeway side

& bye the old barn end they shade the wall
In sunshine nodding to the angry tide
Of winds that winnows bye—these one & all
Makes up the harmony of Spring—& all
That passes feel a sudden love for flowers
They look so green—& when the soft showers fall
 They grow so fast—Dock Burdocks Henbane—all
Who loves not wild flowers bye the old stone wall

LP I 186

The Lodge House (excerpt)

On a heath stood a farm house as lone as coud be
Let em look where they woud nothing else coud they see
But here an odd furze bush & there an odd tree
            Green corn field & fallow land brown
More lonsomly too in a hollow it lay
The hermit like tennants no neighbours had they
To pop in & chat a few hours of the day
            Twas two mile or more from a town

The farmer was wealthy as many coud tell
He managd wi care & he ploughd his land well

& card not for living in such a lone cell
            If he coud get crops to his will
Of servants for labour he kept a good clan
Stiff chaps five or six & a sturdy head man
A house keeping maid & a under wench nan
            Who had in a dairy good skill

Who lives at a lodge but gen dangers prepard
So wealthy & lonly he kept a good guard
& four mettle bull dogs turnd loose in his yard
            & guns ready chargd for alarms
Twas nothing unlikley for rogues coming here
So noted for hurded up wealth as he were
Tho towns round about him for miles far & neer
            Had heard of his dogs & his arms

Tho nothing to scare em as yet hadnt been
Of any one tempting down right to get in
But folks lunging round it at night time was seen
            Which left em suspisions of fear
& maids often sed when the rest were gone church
That shagger-down fellows theyve seen on the lurch
That tryd at the front door & then at the porch
            & begd in excuse bread or beer

(lines 1-32)

Cottage Tales

Carcanet Press (1993)
Robinson, Powell & Dawson

Clare... and Faith

From Ronnie Blythe
(Church Times -- 28th July 2006)

OBSERVING the white night at 3 p.m., I can see the heat resting, as it were. The corn is solid gold, huge, still wedges of it fitted between the headlands; and the garden flowers remain open. There is no dawn chorus, but here and there I can hear a listless soloist. Two horses talk to each other beneath a may-tree. 

Should I get up and write? Should I lie back in the cool, ancient room? Should I listen to horrors on the bedside radio? If I make a sound, the cat will dash in for breakfast.

My oldest friend has died: should I mourn her? At 91? Come, come! I can hear her say. "Try not to be silly, dear." I will read John Donne's soliloquy at her committal, the one about "coming to that holy room, Where . . . I shall be made thy music". But fancy dying during such a summer!

To Helpston for the 25th John Clare Festival. The handsome stone village burns in the sunshine, his cornfields, too. The bar in whose threshing-dust the poet wrote a little algebra with his finger is like an oven. His birthplace would be unrecognisable to him, so white and smart -- his pub, too, with its lavish ploughman's lunch and crowd of authors.

But here is his great -- (several greats) grandson, and here are his readers come to do him honour. Homage-paying literary societies must have begun in the Mermaid Tavern after Shakespeare had departed. Or possibly in Athens, when Sappho had gone to Olympus.

I had to write about John Clare's faith. His church was out of doors. He describes it constantly. Like William Wordsworth, he drew his beliefs from "Nature and her overflowing soul". Clare was the outside worshipper, and poem after poem by him delights in the freedom of the sabbath fields and hearing distant bells. His creed began: "Nature, thou truth from Heaven".

His fellow worshippers were shepherds, gypsies, and herdboys, though mostly he preferred to sing alone amid birds and flowers. The annual cycle of growth, the seasonal weather, and the continuity of creatures and plants in more or less the same few acres, witnessed to him the eternal. In fact, he summed up his religion in a long statement, "The Eternity of Nature", and in a perfect epigram for himself:

He loved the brook's soft sound,
The swallow swimming by;
He loved the daisy covered round,
The cloud bedappled sky;
To him the dismal appeared
The very voice of God. . . 
A silent man in life's affairs,
A thinker from a Boy,
A Peasant in his daily cares --
The Poet in his joy.

In a tender hymn, "A Stranger once did bless the earth", he saw Christ as "An outcast thrown in sorrow's way", and this tragic figure contrasts with his magnificent God, "creator of Nature". Even when cast into the very depths of this world's suffering, in Northampton Asylum, Clare was kept sane by the huge truth of "my Creator God". He and "the insects in the brake" were brothers.

To a favourite tree

Old favourite tree art thou too fled the scene

Could not the ax thy clining age delay
& let thee stretch thy shadows oer the green
& let thee dye in picturesque decay
What hadst thou done to meet a tyrants frown

Be dragd a captive from thy native wood
What was the cause the raige that hewd thee down
Small value was the ground on which thou stood
So sweet in summer as thy branches spread
In such gay cloathing as thy boughs where drest
Where many a shepherd swain has laid his head
& on thy cooling fragrance sunk to rest
Adieu old friends ye trees & bushes dear
The flower refreshd by Morning dews
Hopeful blooms in asure skies
Anon the Noontide heat ensues
It hoples Withers droops & dies
O Cruel change of Love like mine
To bid me hope one only day
& ere that worst of days declind
To snatch that only hope away

Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820)